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A HISTORY OF ENGLAND 




QUEEN ELIZABETH 
From the painting attributed to Marcus Gheeraedts in the National Portrait Gallery. 



A HISTORY OF 

ENGLAND 

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES 
TO THE PRESENT DAY 

By A. D. JPSTNES 

SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD 

AUTHOR OF "ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS " 
"ENGLAND'S INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT," ETC. 




From the Prayer Book 0/1662 

ILLUSTRATED 

FROM SOURCES MAINLY CONTEMPORARY 

AND WITH MAPS 



NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
LONDON : T. C. & E. C. JACK 



*>°. 






£17/00 

A3 



/ f) 



if 



PREFACE 



EVERY period and every aspect of the history of the peoples who have 
created the British Empire has been dealt with in separate works of a 
manageable length ; works, that is, comprised in one or two volumes. 
General histories covering all periods and many aspects have been written 
in many volumes ; but with a single exception all the comprehensive histories 
of England which could by any possibility be printed in one volume in 
legible type have been written as class-books for use in schools, or have 
at least been composed primarily with a view to the needs of the youthful 
reader. 

The one exception, that great classic, the late J. R. Green's Short History 
of the English People, is incomparable in its kind. Nevertheless it has 
appeared possible that another history, of the British nation, not confined 
to the English people, of approximately the same compass but wholly 
different in method and treatment, might appeal to that vast public who 
do desire to know the history of their native country but are repelled by 
the class-boolf; a work which will be found interesting as well as in- 
forming ; a work which does not covertly suggest that the successful 
answering of examination papers is the great object of existence ; a work 
which cannot be used as a class-book : a live history of the mighty nation 
whose children we are. The author has done his best to ensure the 
thoroughness and accuracy without which any professedly historical work 
must stand condemned ; whether he has succeeded in superadding the 
desirable attractiveness, others must judge. An attempt to enumerate the 
modern authorities, not to speak of the older ones, to whose work he is 
consciously or unconsciously indebted, would be merely futile. It only 
remains for him to say that he can claim no credit for the illustration, 
and to express his warm admiration and gratitude for the manner in which 
Mr. S. G. Stubbs has carried out this task. 

A. D. Innes. 

Gerrard's Cross, 
September, 1912. 



CONTENTS 



BOOK 1 

NATION MAKING: TO 1272 
CHAPTER I 

FROM CAESAR TO ALFRED 



I. Celtic Britain and the Roman Occupation 
II. The English Conquest 

III. The Rival Kingdoms . 

IV. Wessex and the Danes 
V. Alfred the Great 



PAGE 
I 

6 
11 

15 
18 



CHAPTER II 

KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 



I. Alfred's Successors 
II. From Knut to the Conquest 
III. The Anglo-Saxon System 



22 
29 
38 





CHAF 


'TE R II I 




THE 


NORMANS 


I. 


The Conqueror 


. 


II. 


William and the Church 


. 


III. 


England and the Conquest 


. 


IV. 


Rufus .... 


. 


V. 


The Lion of Justice 


. 


VI. 


Stephen 


. 


VII. 


Scotland . , 


. 



50 

57 
59 
67 
70 «/ 

75 
78 



CHAPTER IV 

THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 



I. Henry II 


. 81 


.11. The Annexation of Ireland ..... 


. 88 


III. Cceur de Lion ....... 


. 91 


IV. John 


. 94 


V. Henry III. and Simon de Montfort .... 


. IOI 


VI. Aspects ... ... 


. 108 


VII. Scotland ...... 


. 113 



CONTENTS 



BOOK II 

NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION (1272-1485) 
CHAPTER V 

NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 



I. The Reign of Edward I. 
II. Edward's Legislation . 

III. Wales .... 

IV. Edward and the Constitution 
V. The Lordship of Scotland 

VI. Aspects of the Policy of Edward I. 
VI L Robert Bruce . 
VIII. Edward II. . 



PAGE 
117 
119 

122 
126 
I32 
138 
141 

145 



CHAPTER VI 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 



I. Before the Hundred Years' War 
II. The Era of Victories . 

III. The Era of Failures . 

IV. Crown, Commerce, and Parliament . 

V. The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt 
VI. The Reign of Richard II. 
VII. Scotland .... 



151 
*54 
160 

165 
172 
179 
185 



CHAPTER VII 



LANCASTER AND YORK 






I. Henry IV .188 


II. Henry V. . 






.. 191 


III. The Loss of France .... 






. 198 


IV. The Red and White Roses . 






. 206 


V Edward IV. . 






. 213 


VI. Richard III 






. 215 


VII. The Progress of England 






. 218 


VIII. Scotland 






. 222 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE MIDDLE AGES 



I. Political Aspects 
II. Social Aspects 
III. Intellectual Aspects 



226 
232 
235 



CONTENTS 



XI 



BOOK III 

THE AGE OF TRANSITION 
CHAPTER IX 

HENRY VII 



I. Problems of the Dynasty 
II. The Reign of Henry VII. 

III. Henry's System .... 

IV. The Commercial and Agricultural Revolution 
V. Ireland ...••• 

VI. Scotland ...... 



PAGE 
241 

243 
249 
252 
257 
259 



CHAPTER X 

THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 



I. The Cardinal . 
II. The Dawn of the Reformation 

III. The European Schism 

IV. The Breach with Rome 
V. Thomas Cromwell 

VI. Scotland and Ireland . 
VII. Last Years 



262 
268 
271 
274 
282 
288 
291 



I. Protector Somerset 
II. John Dudley 
III. The Succession 
IV. Mary . 



CHAPTER XI 

IN DEEP WATERS 



CHAPTER XII 
THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 



I. The Queen .... 
II. The Settlement in England and Scotland 
III. The Continent: Mary Stuart in Scotland 
IV. Cross Currents 

V. Ireland . • ■ 

VI. The Seamen . . 



298 
302 

3°5 

308 



314 
316 
320 
325 
33° 
332 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 



I. The Jesuit Attack 
II. Coming to the Grip 
III. The Armada . 



340 
346 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



SECTION 

IV. After the Armada 
V. Scotland 
VI. Winter . 



350 
354 
357 



CHAPTER XIV 
UNDER THE TUDORS 



I. The State 
II. The Church . 

III. Economic Progress 

IV. Literature 



363 
3 6 7 
372 
378 



BOOK IV 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER XV 

RIGHT DIVINE 



I. The Spring of Troubles 
II. Puritans, Romanists, and the Impositions 

III. The Foreign Policy of James I. 

IV. Buckingham . 

V. Puritanism 

VI. Rule without Parliament 
VII. Scotland 

VIII. The Bishops' Wars . 



383 
386 

39i 

397 
404 
409 
414 
420 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 



I. The Long Parliament 
II. The First Stage of the Civil War 
III. The New Model 
IV. Downfall 



423 
428 

433 
437 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE COMMONWEALTH 



I. Drogheda and Worcester 
II. The Rump 

III. The Protectorate Governments 

IV. Foreign Policy 

V. The End of the Commonwealth 



445 
450 

454 
460 

463 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE RESTORATION 



I. The King's Return 
II. Clarendon 



467 
469 



CONTENTS 



Xlll 



SECTION 

III. The Cabal and Danby 

IV. The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bills 
V. Scotland .... 

VI. The Victory of the Crown 



PAGE 

474 
480 

485 



CHAPTER XIX 

NEMESIS 



I. Quern Deus vult perdere- 
II. — Prius dementat 
III. Fulfilment 



491 
495 



CHAPTER XX 
THE REVOLUTION 



I. The Revolution Settlement .... 


• 505 


II. Ireland . . . . 


. 509 


III. Scotland ...... 


• 513 


IV. William's War . . 


• 517 


V. The Grand Alliance ..... 


. 524 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE CENTURY 



I. Colonial Expansion . 
II. The Trading Companies 

III. National Finance 

IV. The Spirit of the Age 



531 
534 
540 

543 



BOOK V 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE 
CHAPTER XXII 



QUEEN ANNE 



I. Marlborough 
II. The Union 
III. The Whig Ascendency 
IV. The Tory Ascendency 



549 
555 
560 
566 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE WHIGS, AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 

I. The Hanoverian Succession . . . . . • 57 1 

II. The French Alliance ........ 575 

III. Walpole and the System ....... 581 

IV. The Rule of Walpole / ... 586 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE FALL OF WALPOLE, AND THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 



I. The War in Europe 
II. The Forty-five . 

III. Dupleix 

IV. Clive . 

V. After the War . 



592 

597 
602 
605 
608 



CHAPTER XXV 

EMPIRE 



I. The Grouping of the Powers 
II. Mismanagement 

III. Pitt 

IV. Bengal . 



612 
617 
622 
629 



CHAPTER XXVI 
THE THIRD GEORGE 

I. The New King .... 

II. Bute ...... 

III. George Grenville .... 

IV. The Rockinghams and the Earl of Chatham 
V. Townshend's Taxes and John Wilkes 

VI. India 



636 
637 
641 
647 
650 
655 



CHAPTER XXVII 
CLEAVAGE 



I. The Breach Widens . 
II. From Lexington to Saratoga 

III. France Intervenes 

IV. The Struggle for Life . 
V. Warren Hastings in India 

VI. North, the Whigs, and the younger Pitt 



658 
661 
665 
668 
674 
683 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



I. Ireland 

II. Enclosure, Machinery, and Canals 
III. Literature 



688 
695 
702 



CONTENTS xv 

BOOK VI 

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 
CHAPTER XXIX 



BETWEEN THE WARS 



PAGE 



I. Pitt's Domestic Policy . . • • • • ■ 7°7 

II. Foreign Policy and the French Revolution ..... 712 

III. India and Canada ........ 7*7 

CHAPTER XXX 

THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC AND THE UNION WITH IRELAND 

I. The Fiist Stage . . . . • • • .724 

II. The Second Stage . . . . . . • • 73* 

III. Ireland and the Union . . . . . . . 73 8 

CHAPTER XXXI 

THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 



I, The Black Shadow and Trafalgar 
II. The Continental System 

III. The Peninsula War . 

IV. India and America 

V. Waterloo " . . . 



743 
749 
754 
763 
767 



CHAPTER XXXII 

FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 

I. Castlereagh ......... 775 

II. Canning and Huskisson . . . . . . 782 

III. Reform .......... 787 

IV. India and the Colonies ....... 794 

CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE ERA 

I. Tne Industrial Revolution ....... 801 

II. Literature .......... 808 



BOOK VII 

THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

CHAPTER XXXIV 

THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 

I. After Reform ......... 813 

II. Grey and Melbourne . ....... 815 



XVI 



CONTENTS 



SECTION 


PAGE 


III. Peel 


. 822 


IV. After Peel 


. 826 


V. Ireland ..... 


. 83I 


VI. The Colonies and America . 


■ 835 


VII. India 


. 844 


VIII. Early Victorian .... 


. 851 



CHAPTER XXXV 

THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 



I. The Crimean War 
II. Dalhousie and the Sepoy Revolt 

III. Palmerston 

IV. Foreign Affairs 
V. After Palmerston 

VI. Mid-Victorian 



857 
864 
872 
877 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

DEMOCRACY 



I. Europe 

II. The Gladstone Administration 
III. Beaconsfield . 
IV. India .... 

V. South Africa . 
VI. The Eighty Parliament 



894 
900 
905 
908 
911 



CHAPTER XXXVII 
LORD SALISBURY 



I. The Home Rule Struggle 
II. Lord Salisbury and the Unionists 

III. The Storm Cloud in South Africa . 

IV. The South African War 

V. The Second Salisbury Administration 
VI. Transitional ... 



920 
925 
930 
934 
939 
946 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 
EPILOGUE 



I. Under King Edward VII. 
II. 1910-1912 

INDEX 



List of Illustrations and Historical Notes 
List of Maps ..... 

Genealogical Tables .... 
List of Plates ..... 



949 
958 

965 



xvn 

XXX 

xxxii 
xxxiii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND 
HISTORICAL NOTES 

PAGE 

THE WALL OF HADRIAN, NEAR HOUSESTEADS, NORTHUMBERLAND.— Hadrian's Wall ran from the mouth 
of the Tyne to the mouth of the Solway, a distance of about seventy nailer.. It was built in the years 121 and 
122 a.d., and marked the limit of the Pax Romana in Britain. The Wall proper was of hewn stone, about 8 feet thick, 
and as high, perhaps, as 18 feet ; in front was a ditch 40 feet wide, and at short distances, turrets and small forts 
were built on to the Wall, larger forts, or stations, being erected near the Wall at points four miles apart. The most 
important of all the stations on the Wall — called Borcovicus by the Romans — was at Housesteads, the site of which 
is shown in the drawing 3 

SAXON SPEAR-HEADS. — Saxon arms are known principally from illuminated MSS. (some of which date back to the 
eighth century), and from actual examples found in barrow graves. Those shown here were found in Great Britain. 
They were fastened by nails or rivets to shafts made of ash 9 

SAXON ARROW-HEADS. — The bow was used by the Saxons, though not extensively in earlier times. Several 

of the examples given are from graves 10 

SAXON KNIVES. — The Saxon knife, or dagger, was a weapon common to all classes, and was used for all kinds of 
everyday purposes as well as for aggression. One in the centre is remarkable for the fact that it retains a carved 
wooden handle 12 

SILVER PENNY OF OFFA, KING OF MERCIA — Following the sceat (a generic name for silver coins of the 
seventh century) came the penny first coined by Offa of Mercia (757-796), and imitated from the Frankish silver 
denarius. Offa's pennies are remarkable for the variety and elaboration of their types, and, considering the age 
in which they were issued, their artistic merit 15 

GOLD RING OF ^ETHELWULF.— This ring (now in the British Museum) is a fine example of gold and niello work, 
the decoration consisting in lines delicately engraved in the metal and filled with a black amalgam of silver, copper, 
lead, and sulphur, and'fiighly polished. jEthelwulf's ring is an interesting Saxon example of an art practised in 
Europe from Roman times to the end of the sixteenth century . . . 17 

DRINKING AND MINSTRELSY AMONG THE SAXONS.— Taken from an English Psalter of the eleventh century 
(Harleian MSS. 603), the drawings in which are very freely imitated from the famous Utrecht Psalter, itself executed 
by an Anglo-Saxon artist at Rheims in the ninth century. It is, therefore, very suggestive of ninth-century manners. 
A party of gleemen are entertaining the guests with the harp, fithelere (the modern fiddle), pipe, and dancing . . 20 

A GROUP OF SAXON SOLDIERS, ABOUT a.d. 1000.— From a paraphrase of part of the Old Testament by 
/Elfric, an old English homilist and abbot, who flourished about a.d. 1000, the subject of the drawing being taken 
from Joshua. One king wears a ringed byrnie, while an unarmed armour-bearer carries a second shield. Note the 
double beards 25 

EDGAR MAKING AN OFFERING.— Edgar granted a charter in 966 to the new minster (known as Hyde Abbey) 
founded by Alfred at Winchester. This drawing iorms the lower portion of the frontispiece of the charter and 
supplies a contemporary, though crude, portrait of the king. The king is represented as supported by the Virgin 
Mary and St. Peter, and making an offering of his charter to Christ seated in glory above 26 

AN ANGLO-SAXON BED, ABOUT a.d. 1000.— From /Elfric's Paraphrase of Genesis. The bed shown consisted of 
benches placed in a recess in the chamber separated by a curtain from the rest of the apartment. The modern word 
" bedstead " means, literally, " a place for a bed," and what we call bedsteads were probably in the ninth and tenth 
centuries only possessed by the higher nobles. It is interesting to note that even in bed Saxon women kept the 
head covered with the head-rail 28 

KNUT AND EMMA, HIS QUEEN.— From a book of grants to Hyde Abbey (Stowe MSS.) similar to that of Edgar. 

Knut is shown confirming his grant on the Abbey altar 29 

AN ENGLISH MONARCH. — Copied from an English Psalter of the eleventh century. Especially to be noted in the 

rather elaborate costume is the leather cross-gartering 31 

SEAL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.— From an impression of the First Great Seal of Edward .... 33 

TAKING TOLL. — From the Psalter (Harleian MSS. 603), before quoted, representing the taking of toll in the market 

place or at the city gates 34 

JAVELIN AND DAGGER. — A spirited little drawing from the Anglo-Saxon Psalter belonging to the Due de Berri. 

It gives an example of the use of weapons shown on page 12 35 

A SAXON SLINGER.— From the Saxon and Latin Psalter of Boulogne 35 

THE KING UPON HIS THRONE— Montfaucon (AnliguWs de France) says that this drawing appeared in an 

English Book of Prayers of the eleventh century, and suggests that it represents Harold upon his throne ... 36 

xvii If 



xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 
HAROLD RECEIVES AN ARROW IN HIS EYE, AND DIES.— A scene from the famous Tapestry of Bayeux 
discovered by Montfaucon in 1729. It was executed for Bishop Odo (half-brother of the Conqueror) soon after 
Senlac. A full-size facsimile of the Tapestry is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington . . 38 

THE KING PRESIDING OVER THE WITAN— From ^line's Paraphrase before referred to. Ostensibly the 
drawing depicts Pharaoh and his ministers doing justice upon the unfortunate baker who was afterwards hanged, 
but the illuminator has so obviously drawn upon the only model of a royal council known to him that he has 
preserved a contemporary representation of the chiefs of the Witanagemot 40 

THE. KING AND HIS THEGNS — A drawing from a paraphrase of the Bible (attributed to Casdmon, Bodleian 
MSS., Junius xi.), which, despite its nominal purpose, depicts a Saxon king with his quantum of knights, or comites, 
making up the cotniiaius, his personal bodyguard 4.2 

THE SAXON TOWER OF SOMPTING CHURCH, SUSSEX.— An example, entirely unique in England, of a Saxon 
tower (early eleventh century) with a four-sided gable spire, and one of the few pre-Norman English buildings now 
existing in a fine state of preservation. Note how the builders, though they were working in stone, have used and 
imitated the forms of timbering to which they were accustomed, e.g. in the strips of stone down the centre of each side 43 

A SAXON BANQUET AT A ROUND TABLE.— From an early eleventh-century Psalter. Roasted meats were 
brought to the Saxon table on the spits as they were cooked. Forks were not used, and each man's dagger served 
as his knife. The vessels represented are practically identical in form with those which are found in earlier Anglo- 
Saxon graves 45 

ANGLO-SAXON GLEEMAN, OR JUGGLER.— From an eleventh-century Psalter , 46 

THE OLD ENGLISH BURH, OR FORTIFIED PLACE.— A drawing from the paraphrase of the Old Testament 
attributed to Casdmon in the Bodleian Library, intended to portray the Tower of Babel. Actually the illuminator 
has drawn the kind of building which he knew, and thereby gives a close idea, allowing for crudity of presentation, 
of the Saxon walled and fortified town. See also note on page 42 47 

ANGLO-SAXON SPEARS AND SWORDS. — From contemporary MSS. and specimens found in grave-mounds. Notice 

the guards below the heads of the spears intended to prevent sword blows cutting through the ashen stocks . . 48 

SAXON PUNISHMENTS. — The stocks were generally placed at the side of the road at the entrance to the town, where 

also offenders were chained in a kind of pillory. From an English Psalter of the eleventh century (Harleian MSS. 603) 49 

THE GREAT SEAL OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 51 

NORMANS AT DINNER. — From the Bayeux Tapestry, representing Harold and his companions carousing. They are 

seated in an upper apartment separated from the miscellaneous throng that crowded the great hall .... 53 

ARCHES IN THE NAVE OF ST. ALBANS ABBEY CHURCH.— The great nave of St. Albans, one of the longest 

in England, was built by Abbot Paul between 1077 and 1093 55 

AN AISLE IN THE CHAPEL OF ST. JOHN, TOWER OF LONDON.— This chapel forms part of the magnifi- 
cent White Tower, or Keep, which was built by Bishop Gundulf of Rochester about 1078. It is one of the most 
notable examples of early Norman work 58 

A NORMAN BED. — From a twelfth-century MS., containing Anglo-Norman drawings of biblical subjects. Norman 

furniture was much more ornamental than that of the Saxons ; the beds also assumed new and more elaborate forms 60 

SCENES IN ENGLISH OUTDOOR LIFE IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.— From a Saxon calendar in a 
hymnarium in the British Museum, depicting the occupations of each of the twelve months of the year. The four 
given are for May, June, July, and October 61 

AN IDEAL PLAN OF A NORMAN CASTLE. — From Grose's Military Antiquities, showing the arrangement of a 

typical castle of the eleventh and twelfth centuries 65 

A MANOR-HOUSE OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.— From the Harleian MS. referred to in the note under page 20. 
This drawing illustrates Psalm CXI. The larger building with the stag's head and ending with a tower is the Saxon 
hall. On the right is the chapel. The house was probably of wood with a foundation and lower walls in masonry . 66 

SEAL OF ARCHBISHOP ANSELM.— From Ducarel's Anglo-Norman Antiquities 68 

A NORMAN SCHOOL, ABOUT 1130-1140. — From a Psalter containing Anglo-Norman drawings. In the original 
the scholars form a complete circle round the teacher, who appears to be lecturing viva voce, while two MS. writers 
proceed with their work 72 

AN ORGAN, ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.— This drawing from the Harleian MS. 
603, before referred to, is one of those imitated from the earlier Utrecht Psalter. Church Organs were therefore 
known in England before the Conquest. William of Malmesbury speaks of an organ given to Malmesbury by Dunstan 
in the reign of Edgar 73 

OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL TREASURY, ABOUT 1140.— From the same Psalter as the last illustration. It may 
well represent officials of the Court of Exchequer under Henry I., in whose reign payments were required to be made 
in silver instead of in kind 74 

THE ENGLISH STANDARD, 1138.— From an almost contemporary MS. (at Corpus Christi, Cambridge), with an 

account of the Battle of the Standard by jEtheldred, Abbot of Rievaulx 76 

SEAL OF HENRY, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.— From an engraving in the Journal of the Archaological Association . 77 

CHURCH OF ST. REGULUS, ST. ANDREWS.— A chancelled Scottish pre-Norman church. The tower dates from 

the tenth to twelfth centuries, but it is properly related, in its style, to the twelfth century 79 

THOMAS A BECKET ARGUING WITH HENRY II. AND KING LOUIS.— From a French life of A Becket, 
written in England in the thirteenth century; a fine example of French illumination carried out by English hands. 
From a facsimile by the Societe des Anciens Textes Francais ,,,,,,,,,,, 83 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xix 

PAGE 

MOUNTED SOLDIERS OF THE TIME OF HENRY II.— Taken from a page of drawings illustrating Maccabees I. 

in a vellum copy of the Bible of Henry II. (1154-1189) belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Winchester . .. .. 8.5 

KNIGHTS OF THE LATE TWELFTH CENTURY 86 

LADIES OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY WEAVING.— From Eadwine's Psalter at Trinity College, Cambridge, 
which is similar in many respects to the Utrecht Psalter and the Harleian MSS. (603), so often drawn upon. 
Weaving appears to have been practised very extensively in the larger Norman households 87 

AN IRISH CHALICE OF THE TENTH TO ELEVENTH CENTURIES.— One of the most beautiful products of 
Celtic art. It was found at Ardagh, and belongs to an early class of two-handled cups meant for the communion 
of the minor clergy and people. It is 7 inches high, and is of silver and bronze gilt, ornamented with repousse and 
filigree work in gold and also in fine enamels, of exquisite execution 89 

AN ENGLISH MONARCH, ABOUT 1 190.— From a Book of Prayers in the British Museum. It may, perhaps, 

represent Richard 1 92 

TRANSLATION OF HOLY RELICS IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.— After a drawing by Matthew of 
Paris, a famous monk and chronicler of St. Albans, who died in 1259. His Chronica Majora give exceedingly vivid 
impressions of his age ; as a draughtsman he was unequalled 97 

WEST DEAN PARSONAGE. — A thirteenth-century building in Sussex, one of the earliest domestic buildings in England 

which remains substantially intact 99 

AN EARLY THIRTEENTH-CENTURY KNIGHT.— From an incised slab on the tomb of Sir John de Bitton at Bitton, 

Somersetshire, 1227. A fine example of chain mail 102 

SIMON DE MONTFORT THE ELDER.— The father of the English Earl Simon. From a window in Chartres 

Cathedral, 1230 •«*, 10G 

ORDINATION OF A PRIEST.— From an Anglo-Norman MS. roll (late twelfth century) of pictures of the life of the 

holy Guthlac of Mercia, who lived at Crowland in the eighth century no 

TRAVELLERS IN ANGLO-NORMAN DRESS.— From a twelfth-century Psalter, with Anglo-Norman drawings. The 

one chosen represents the Flight into Egypt 112 

DAVID I. AND MALCOLM IV. — As portrayed in Malcolm's Charter to Kelso Abbey, about n 60 114 

A KNIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.— The Brass of Sir John D'Abernoun (d. 1277) in Stoke Dabernon 
Church, the earliest effigy on brass known in Great Britain or on the Continent. It is further unrivalled as an 
example of technique and patient, scrupulous work by its engraver 121 

CONWAY CASTLE, NORTH WALES.— Built in 1284 by Edward I. after his conquest of North Wales . . .124 

TOLL HOUSE AND PRISON, GREAT YARMOUTH.— Most of this building dates from the thirteenth century. 
It has a large chamber, which was used for the collection of tolls and, later, for meetings of the Borough Court. A 
dungeon under the building was in use as a prison until the beginning of the nineteenth century .... 127 

EDWARD I. RECEIVING THE BULL OF POPE BONIFACE VIII.— From a thirteenth-century MS. in the British 
Museum containing drawings of English kings from Edward the Confessor to Edward I., with short notices of each 
king in French 130 

A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CARICATURE UPON THE JEWS OF NORWICH.— Norwich was one of the 
principal seats of the Jews in England in the reign of Henry III., and in this caricature (a sketch by the clerk who 
engrossed the Jews' Roll in the Public Record Office) Isaac of Norwich, the crowned Jew with three faces, is repre- 
sented as chief among them. Demons (Dagon and " Colbif "), false balances, and forked tongues make up a piquant 
satire 140 

HOUSEWIFE, EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY.— A figure from one of the Sloane MSS. showing an early 

example of the " barme cloth," afterwards called the apron 147 

COSTUME OF THE COMMONALTY, EDWARD II.— Showing the women's headgear, the wimple, and boots of 

untanned leather 148 

BRASS OF SIR JOHN DE CREKE, 1325.— In Westley Waterless Church, Cambridgeshire. A finely typical brass 

of ithe armour of the period^perhaps the earliest showing the use of plate armour . . . .' . . . 149 

OPENING A JOUST IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.— From one of the Egerton MSS. in the British Museum, 

giving rules for the conduct of knightly jousts and tournaments 150 

EDWARD III. AND ST. GEORGE.— From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery of the effigy on the king's 

monument in Westminster Abbey 151 

A ROYAL DINNER PARTY IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.— From a Norman MSS. of the Romance of 
Meliadus in the British Museum. The comparative meagreness of the table and its appointments, though for the 
sovereign, is of interest. Forks are not yet in use 153 

EDWARD III. MEETS HIS COUSIN OF FRANCE.— From a French MS. chronicle in the British Museum. Edward 
met the newly-confirmed Philip VI. in 1331 (after he gained his freedom from the Regency of his mother, Isabella, and 
Roger Mortimer) to do homage to Philip for Guienne and his other French possessions. Six years later he renounced 
that homage, and the Hundred Years' War began 153 

A SEA FIGHT, ABOUT THE TIME OF THE BATTLE OF SLUYS.— From a MS. in the British Museum, illu- 
minated about 1350. See also the note on the illustration on page 170 156 



xx LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

AN ARCHER OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.— From a British Museum MS., illuminated about 1330. It 
was ia the fourteenth century that the efficacy of the bow, the most deadly weapon devised until the introduction 
of gunpowder, came to be fully recognised and the archer attained the height of his importance. Crecy proved 
that archery combined with infantry could utterly rout forces that relied upon cavalry charges .... 157 

CROSS-BOW AND QUARREL AS USED AT CRECY.— The quarrel of the cross-bow, or arbalest, was a heavy, 
short bolt with a square head and winged like an arrow. It did not carry so far as the arrow, but was deadly at 
short range 158 

ARCHER AND ARBALESTIER. — Occasionally the archer and arbalestier (or cross-bowman) were protected with 

heavy armour, as in the two figures given here, taken from a MS. 153 

A TEMPORARY BESIEGING FORT OF TIMBER.— From a MS. of Sir John Froissart's Chronicles of England 
in the British Museum. The gate of a castle is being attacked from a timber fort of great strength of construction. 
A battery of two cannon is included, and the mixture of arms includes long-bow, cross-bow, and hand-guns. As 
yet the bow and catapult remained weapons more effective than the clumsy hand-guns and cannon . . . 161 

ENGLISH MAN-AT-ARMS AND ARCHER.— From Froissart's Chronicles of England, a typical illustration of 
the complete plate armour of the fourteenth century. The archer is protected by plates of steel, a skirt of mail, 
and a visored helmet ; the lower part of the body is unprotected 163 

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ABBOT PREACHING.— In the fourteenth century, and later, congregations were 

accustomed to sit upon the floors of the churches as shown in this drawing from a MS. of Richard II. 's reign . . 154 

A MERCHANT OF 1367. — From a very fine brass on the tomb of Robert Braunche, a wool merchant of Lynn, Norfolk. 
Under Edward III. the trade in English wool flourished greatly, and the merchants and burgesses of the east coast 
became men of affluence and importance 166 

A GOLDSMITH'S SHOP IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.— An interesting picture of a medieval shop. The 

goldsmiths were the bankers as well as the jewellers of the Middle Ages 167 

GOLD ROSE-NOBLE OF EDWARD III.— The noble long remained the sole gold currency of England. It was 
introduced by Edward III. in 1344. The figure of the king in a ship on the obverse is generally thought to refer 
to the naval victory of Sluys in 1340 . 170 

A BISHOP'S COURT. — From an Italian MS. of the late fourteenth century in the British Museum . . .171 

A STATE CARRIAGE OF ABOUT ^30 — From the Luttrell Psalter, a finely illuminated MS. written for Sir Geoffrey 

Luttrell (see page 227), who died in 1345 172 

PENSHURST, THE HALL OF A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY BARON.— Penshurst was originally the residence 
of Sir Stephen de Penchester. By Henry VIII. it was granted to his chamberlain, Sir William Sidney, and thus it 
became the home of the Sidney family. The hall of the mansion, built about 1340, has a fine open- timbered roof 
and a minstrel's gallery . 173 

JOHN BALL HARANGUING.— From a picture in a Froissart MS. of John Ball addressing a crowd of Wat Tyler's 

insurgents in the market-place 176 

RICHARD II. — From a diptych (representing the king being presented to the Virgin by three patron saints) at Wilton 
House, belonging to the Earl of Pembroke. Probably painted soon after Richard's accession by an Italian artist in 
England. In his reign the wildest extravagances in dress prevailed ; his robes are noticeably luxurious . . 178 

LADIES HAWKING. — From a fourteenth-century MS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris i8r 

LADIES SHOOTING RABBITS. — Archery was a favourite recreation with the ladies of the Middle Ages, and there 
are frequent examples of their prowess in the MSS. In this instance, from a fourteenth-century MS. in the Britisn 
Museum, a bolt is used instead of the ordinary sharp-headed arrow 182 

RICHARD II. GOES TO HIS FRIENDS AT CONWAY CASTLE.— From a magnificently illuminated metrical 
life of Richard,, written by a Frenchman who was a member of the king's suite through the troublous later part of 
his life. In the British Museum 184 

EDWARD III. AND DAVID OF SCOTLAND.— From an illumination at the head of the articles of the Peace of 

1357 with David. One of the Cotton MSS 186 

AN ABBOT TRAVELLING.— From St. Alban's Book. The abbot wears a hat over his hood, and is giving his bene- 
diction to a passing traveller 191 

A MEDIEVAL SIEGE-ENGINE. — A machine for throwing stones, etc., into a besieged city by the action of a 

twisted cord. From one of the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum 195 

A BATTERING-RAM AND ITS USE.— The ram consists of a heavy timber beam with a head, probably of metal, 

swung from a frame by a rope. The drawing also shows the armour of the second half of the fifteenth century . 195 

THE SIEGE OF ROUEN BY HENRY V.— Part of a delicately executed drawing occurring in John Rous's Lives 
of the Earls of Warwick, in a MS. of the late fifteenth century in the British Museum. Rouen was the last town 
to hold out against Henry in his Normandy campaign 197 

BESIEGING A FRENCH TOWN AT THE END OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.— A phase in the siege 
of Dieppe by Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. The English had captured and occupied a fort commanding the town, 
which the French are here represented as assaulting. The cannon used and portable bridges for crossing the moats 
are of interest. From one of the principal MSS. of Froissart's Chronicles at Paris, of which the first portion is in 
the British Museum 201 

CARDINAL BEAUFORT'S CHAUNTRY IN WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL.— Henry Beaufort, half-brother of 
Henry IV., made Bishop of Winchester in 1404 and Cardinal in 1426, was Chancellor of England three times and 
the principal opponent of the schemes and intrigues of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. He finished the building 
of Winchester Cathedral and died in 1447 203 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xxi 

PAGE 

TATTERSHALL, A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CASTLE.— A splendid building in brick in the Perpendicular style . 206 

THE YOUTHFUL HENRY VI. — From a drawing in the beautiful MS. Life of St. Edmund^ by John Lydgate, 
possibly written and illuminated when Henry stayed at St. Edinundsbury in 1433. The MS. (British Museum) 
includes an illumination depicting Lydgate presenting the " Life " to the king 208 

THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER AND THE EARL OF WARWICK IN BATTLE.— From Rous's Lives of the 

Earls of Warwick, a late fifteenth-century MS. 210 

A BEDROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.— From Lydgate's Life of St. Edmund, 

representing the saint's birth and showing well the richness and luxury that was growing up in the fifteenth century 211 

EDWARD IV., HIS SON, EDWARD V., AND THE COURT.— Representing Earl Rivers presenting his translation 
of the Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres to the king, to which this illumination forms the frontispiece. 
It also affords the only known contemporary portrait of the prince who became Edward V. It has been stated 
that the figure in monkish garb is Caxton, who revised and printed this translation by Earl Rivers, it being the first 
dated book printed in England 214 

AN ALDERMAN OF LONDON, 1474. — From the brass of John Field, " sometyme alderman of London, a merchant 

of the stapull of Caleys, the which deceased in the yere of our Lord God," 1474 220 

A MERCHANT. — From Caxton's Game and Playe of Chesse, printed in 1475 at Bruges 221 

AN ENGLISH KNIGHT IN FULL CAPARISON.— From the frontispiece illumination to the Luttrell Psalter, 

showing Sir Geoffrey Luttrell being armed by his wife and daughter 227 

A ROYAL CARRIAGE AND ITS ESCORT, ABOUT 1480.— Up to the latter part of the fifteenth century horses 
were almost the only means of conveyance. About this time pictures of carriages are more often met with, but 
they are generally clumsy vehicles, however gorgeous, and seem only to have been used by persons of high estate . 229 

A COMPLETE SUIT OF GOTHIC ARMOUR, ABOUT 1470.— From the Wallace Collection 231 

AN ENGLISH KNIGHT OF 1400.— From the brass of Sir George Felbrigge, Playford Church, Suffolk . . . .233 

A MS. REPRESENTATION OF A HOUSE.— From a fourteenth-century MS. of the Romance of the San Graal . 234 

A PUPPET SHOW. — From a French MS. Romance of Alexander in the Bodleian. It is of fourteenth-century origin, 

and suggests considerable antiquity for the modern Punch and Judy show 235 

THE HIERARCHY OF THE SCIENCES AS CONCEIVED BY MEDIEVAL THOUGHT.— From a Bible in the 
British Museum illuminated about 1290 for Jehan, Due de Berri. St. Peter and St. Paul are seated on either siae 
of the Heavenly Throne. The other personalities are self-explanatory. The illumination is interesting in the 
emphatic precedence given to theology. over science, which was natural to the medieval mind .... 237 

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. — From a portrait painted by Thomas Occleve (a pupil of Chaucer) in a copy of his Rege- 
ment of Princes, now in the British Museum. It shows Chaucer as an old man, perhaps as he might have been 
seen walking in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in the last months of his life 238 

A SPECIMEN OF CAXTON'S PRINTING.— The dedication of the Game and Playe of Chesse, Caxton's second printed 

book, printed at Bruges (where he lived for thirty-five years) in 1475. See also the note on the illustration on p. 214 239 

HENRY VII. — From a finely sculptured bronze bust in the Victoria and Albert Museum, ascribed to Torregiano, an 

Italian sculptor, who visited England early in the sixteenth century 244 

THE HUNDRED MEN'S HALL AT ST. CROSS, NEAR WINCHESTER.— The Hospital of St. Cross was founded by 
Henry de Blois in 1136 to provide lodging for thirteen poor men and a daily dinner for a hundred others. It was 
enlarged by William of Wykeham and by Cardinal Beaufort, and is a unique example of a medieval almshouse . 246 

THE POLITICAL GAME OF CARDS.— Perhaps the earliest example of the modern caricature. It is French, and 
represents Louis XII. as holding the winning hand. The other two players are the Swiss and Venetian rulers. Round 
are grouped Henry VII. of England and the King of Spain in conversation, Pope Alexander VI. (the infamous 
Borgia) — who is anxious as to the game his ally, Louis, is playing — the Emperor, with a fresh pack of cards, and 
other European princes 247 

A SHILLING OF HENRY* VII. — First struck in 1504 and introducing the practice of putting the head in profile, 

wherefore it was called a " testoon " ............... 248 

BEDESMEN, TIME OF HENRY VII.— From the initial letter of a deed by which Henry VII. founded a fraternity 

of thirteen poor men in Westminster Abbey. The abbot, monks, and royal bedesmen are shown .... 249 

MONKS AND LAWYERS. — An illuminated letter from a deed of grant by Henry VII. to Westminster Abbey which 

had to be read in chapter yearly by the king's attorney 250 

HENRY VII. 'S CHAPEL, WESTMINSTER ABBEY.— This eastern chapel of the Virgin Mary in the Abbey, which 
replaced an earlier Lady Chapel, is ornamented with an extraordinary luxuriance and fineness of detail, and is, 
perhaps, the most remarkable English building of the period. It is in the late Perpendicular style . . -251 

A GENTLEMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VII.— A drawing of a well-to-do citizen from a MS. of the Romaunt 

of the Rose 252 

A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY WOOL MERCHANT.— From a brass in Northleach Church, Gloucestershire . . .253 

AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS.— From woodcuts in Barclay's Eclogue, 1509 255 



xxii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A COMMON OR OPEN FIELD.— This common or open field at Stogursey, near Watchet, Somersetshire, was carried 
on until 1879. The balks — pieces of unploughed land — separating each strip are well shown. The strips of land 
were ordinarily of an acre or half an acre in extent, forty rods long, and four rods wide, each man's holding consist- 
ing of strips distributed over the whole field or district, so that he might have as many as 150 strips to farm of which 
no two would be adjacent. From a photograph by Miss E. M. Leonard 256 

JAMES III. OF SCOTLAND. — From a painting of J ames and his son at Holyrood 260 

CARDINAL WOLSEY. — After the portrait by Holbein at Christ Church, Oxford 263 

FRANCIS I. AND HENRY VIII. AT THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD IN PICARDY, in 1520.— From 
a sculpture at Rouen in a house of the sixteenth century of the scenes at the meeting of the two kings done by the 
order of Francis 1 266 

THE ARMY OF HENRY VIII., ABOUT 1513. — From a contemporary MS. in the British Museum. The assault has 
just begun on the king's army, which consists of artillery, protected by mantelets of timber, two lines of arquebusiers 
and a main body of pikemen 267 

ERASMUS. — The obverse of a German medal of 1519 in the Victoria and Albert Museum 269 

JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.— After the drawing by Holbein in the British Museum . . .270 

MARTIN LUTHER. — After the painting by Lucas Cranach at Florence 272 

THE POPE STRUGGLING WITH CALVIN AND LUTHER.— From Jaime, MusSe de la Caricature. An early 

engraving representing the mutual hostility of the two great opponents of the Papacy 273 

THE MUSIC OF THE DEMON. — A contemporary woodcut satirising Luther from the Catholic standpoint . . 274 

THE OVERTHROW OF THE POPE. — From a pamphlet issued in 1521 by Lucas Cranach, presenting the idea that 

Antichrist was emblematical of the Papacy, and that the end of his reign on earth was then approaching . . 275 

HENRY VIII. — After a painting usually attributed to Holbein ; it is probable that none of the many paintings of Henry 

VIII. is by Holbein . ' • 277 

THOMAS CRANMER. — From Vertue's engraving of Holbein's painting 279 

HEADING OF THE PAPAL BULL AGAINST THE DISSOLUTION OF HENRY'S MARRIAGE . . . .281 

THOMAS CROMWELL.— After the engraving in Holland's Heroologia 282 

QUEEN JANE SEYMOUR.— After the drawing by Holbein 286 

IRISH GROAT OF HENRY VIII. —Struck in 1530. The first Irish coin on which the harp appears .... 290 

SUIT OF ARMOUR FOR FIGHTING ON FOOT, HENRY VIIL— Preserved in the Tower of London. This suit, 

made in the Maximilian style for Henry VIII., is one of the finest in existence. It weighs 93 lbs. , 293 

THE SIEGE OF BOULOGNE BY HENRY VIIL, 1544.— From an engraving in VetustaMonumenta, after a painting 
which hung in Cowdray House, Midhurst, Sussex, until its destruction by fire in 1793. Sixteenth-century siege 
tactics are depicted with great vigour. The painting is one of a series executed about 1550 .... 293 

AN ARQUEBUSIER . . 295 

A PIKEMAN. — Two drawings from the same MS. as the illustration on page 267. They show well the weapons and 

half-armour worn 2 9& 

A PORTRAIT MEDAL OF EDWARD VI.— A medal struck by a foreign artist in England, 1547. Medal-making 
was not practised in England till long after Continental artists had achieved high distinction, and it is only at rare 
intervals up to the middle of the eighteenth century that English medallists of note are met with . . . 299 

THE CORONATION PROCESSION THROUGH LONDON OF EDWARD VI.— Part of a large engraving published 
by the Society of Antiquaries of a contemporary painting at Cowdray House, Midhurst, destroyed in 1793. The 
procession is passing Cheapside Cross on its way to Westminster from the Tower 300 

MUMMERS AT A FEAST ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.— From an engraving 

in Der Weiss Konig, a life of the Emperor Maximilian 303 

LADY JANE GREY. — From an engraving of the painting by Holbein 307 

QUEEN MARY. — From a miniature painting by Luis de Vargas, 1555, in the Victoria and Albert Museum . . 309 

STEPHEN GARDINER.— After a portrait by Holbein. Gardiner was Bishop of Winchester under Henry VIIL, 

imprisoned in Edward VI. 's reign, and Lord Chancellor under Mary 3 1 * 

THE MARTYRDOM OF LATIMER AND RIDLEY.— From John Foxe's Actes and Monumentes of these latter and 
perillous Dayes touching Matters of the Church, commonly spoken of as the Book of Martyrs, published in 15*3. 
Latimer and Ridley were burnt in 1555 3M 

QUEEN ELIZABETH.— From the painting by Marcus Gheeraedts in the National Portrait Gallery. It is very similar 

to a portrait at Penshurst presented by the Queen to Sir Henry Sidney 3 1 ? 

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S STATE CARRIAGE.— From a print in Braun's Civitaies Orbis Terrarum . . . .319 

QUEEN MARY STUART.— From a remarkable chalk-drawing, by Francois Clouet (generally known as Janet or Janette), 

in the Bibliotneque Nationale. The Queen is represented in her widow's weeds 331 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xxiii 

PAGE 
THE BATTLE OF CARBERY HILL, 1567.— From an engraving after a contemporary original in Vetusta Monu- 

menta. Queen Mary is seen surrendering herself to the Confederate Lords 323 

JAMES STEWART, EARL OF MORAY.— After a contemporary painting 324 

SIR THOMAS GRESHAM — Banker and merchant under Mary and Elizabeth ; he was known as the " greatest merchant 

in London." He built the First Royal Exchange in 1566 and established Gresbam College 326 

TOWN HOUSES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.— From an engraving in the English edition of John Barclay's 

famous book of satires, Siultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, 1570 327 

QUEEN ELIZABETH HUNTING.— From Turberville's Noble Art of Venerie, 1575 329 

KNIFE WHICH BELONGED TO DRAKE.— A clasp knife mounted in a handle of chamois horn and engraved 

brass 334 

THE GOLDEN HIND AT JAVA.— From the rare chart of Drake's voyage round the world, and Cavendish's 
repetition of it in 1586. New Albion was the northernmost point of the American west coast that Drake touched at. 
The district that Drake discovered there includes the whole province of California and part of the north-west coast 
of America adjoining. From there he sailed home through J ava and the Spice Islands 334 

FRANCIS WALSINGHAM.— From an engraving by Vertue 339 

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN PARLIAMENT, 1586.— From a contemporary print. Cecil will be seen on the Queen's 

right hand, and in the foreground the Commons 34 1 

AN ENGLISH SHIP IN THE ARMADA FIGHT.— From a contemporary engraving of one of the tapestries which 
hung in the old House of Lords until its destruction by fire in 1834. They were done to the order of the Earl of 
Nottingham, Lord High Admiral, but were not put up until 1650 347 

THE DEFEAT OF THE ARMADA. — From a broadside issued on the occasion of Elizabeth going to the Thanks- 
giving at St. Paul's for the victory. It quaintly depicts the English fireships drifting into the Spanish Fleet, and 
the Queen on the shore and bodies of pikemen ready to repel any landing 349 

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN HER ARMADA THANKSGIVING ROBES.— From a miniature in the Victoria and 

Albert Museum executed in 1616 35° 

ELIZABETHAN ARMOUR. — A very typical suit of fighting armour from the brass of Humphrey Brewster, Wrentham 

Church, Suffolk 353 

SIR WALTER RALEIGH.— From the engraving by Houbraken 354 

JAMES DOUGLAS, FOURTH EARL OF MORTON.— From a painting at Dalmahoy 355 

ROBERT CECIL.— After* the engraving by Elstrak 358 

THE FUNERAL HEARSE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.— Taken from a series of drawings of the great funeral pro- 
cession by William Camden, Clarencieux King-at-Arms, and a famous antiquarian and historian. He published his 
Britannia in 1586, and his History of the Reign of Elizabeth in 1615 361 

ARMOUR PRESENTED TO HENRY VIII. BY THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN.— In the Tower of London . 364 

THE HARRY GRACE A DIEU, BUILT BY HENRY VIII. IN 1513— From a drawing of 1546 in the Pepysian 

Library, Cambridge 365 

AN ELIZABETHAN FAMILY. — From a monumental brass, dated 1584, of the Day family at Little Bradley Church, 

Suffolk 366 

A CUT FROM THE GREAT BIBLE OF 1539.— Depicting manna falling in the wilderness. This splendid folio 
Bible, carried out by order of Henry VIII. under the direction of Thomas Cromwell and Miles Coverdale, was the 
first official translation. The printing was begun in Paris in 1538, but was stopped by the Inquisition, and the printers 
and their presses transferred to London. The second edition of 1540, called Cranmer's Bible, was the " Byble 
apoynted to the use of the churches " 368 

THE TWO SHEPHERDS.— From a broadside by Hans Sachs satirising the papal church on the text of the Gospel of 
St. John x. 1, 4, r2. Christ stands by the door, while the Pope " climbeth up some other way " andsits on the roof 
pointing out the wrong way to the Christian flock. One of the learned doctors of the Church is looking out over the 
entrance to watch the proceedings of the Good Shepherd 369 

AT THE MARKET, 1603.— From a broadside 373 

WEAVING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.— From one of the early editions of Erasmus's Praise of Folly . . 374 

EASTCHEAP MARKET, ABOUT 1598.— From a drawing in the British Museum. Stow says that this flesh-market 
was kept for serving the east part of the City, being afterwards removed to I.eadenhall. Eastcheap was swallowed 
up in the. London Bridge improvements in William IV. 's reign. Westcheap became Cheapside . . . . 376 

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MENDICANTS.— From Barclay's Ship of Fools before referred to (page 327) . . ' . 377 

A CUT'FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF SPENSER'S SHEPHEARD'S CALENDAR.— The only known copy 

of this edition is in the British Museum . . 379 

SHAKESPEARE. — From the Droeshout portrait. Mr. Spielmann and other leading authorities conclude that of all the 
swarms of Shakespeare portraits, fabrications and others, only two — the engraving by Droeshout affixed to the First 
Folio of 1623, and the bust at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon — can be accepted as authentic likenesses . 381 

A MUSKETEER OF 1603. — From an engraving in Skelton's Armour ........... B 384 



xxiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

JAMES I. — From the engraving by J. Smith after the painting by Vandyck . 387 

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT CONSPIRATORS.— From an engraving by C. Van der Passe, showing the eight principal 

conspirators 388 

HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES, DIED 1612.— From Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, a monumental 
work published in thirty " Songs " or books between 1612 and 1622. It was, the poet says, " a Herculean toil," and 
covered every point then of topographical or antiquarian interest in Great Britain 392 

SIR FRANCIS BACON, VISCOUNT ST. ALBAN.— After the contemporary engraving by William Marshall . . 395 

GEORGE VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.— From an engraving after the portrait by Mierevelt . . 398 

A CAVALIER OF 1620 400 

AN INFANTRYMAN OF 1625. — Two engravings from Skelton's Armour 402 

CHARLES I. — From a miniature painting by Matthew Snelling, 1647, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Drawn on 

paper prepared with a thin coating of plaster 405 

WESTMINSTER IN THE TIME OF CHARLES I.— From a print by Hollar, 1641 4°7 

ARCHBISHOP LAUD.— After the portrait by Vandyck 408 

A LADY IN HER CHAIR. — From an album of MS. drawings, dated between 1603 and 1638, in the British Museum. 

She is evidently a lady of rank 409 

THE OLD STAR CHAMBER.— Pulled down after the burning of the old Houses of Parliament in 1834 . . 4 n 

A PIKEMAN, 1635. — From Skelton's Armour 412 

CHEAPSIDE AND THE CROSS IN T638— From La Serres' Entrte Royale de la Regne Mere du Roy, an account of the 
entry of Marie of Medici, mother of the Queen of Charles, into London. The Cross was destroyed in 1643 by the 
Parliamentarians as an object of superstition 414 

PLAN AND VIEW OF EDINBURGH IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.— From a contemporary 

print 416 

A NEWSPAPER HEADING OF 1641 426 

THE CHURCH MILITANT : A BISHOP OF 1642.— From a large caricature of the year of the Royalist judges, the 
warlike prelates, and the ruffling cavaliers. The prelate satirised is Archbishop William of York, who garrisoned 
Conway for the king 427 

REVERSE OF £3 PIECE OF CHARLES I. STRUCK AT OXFORD, 1643 430 

COIN PORTRAIT OF CHARLES I. ON £3 PIECE OF 1643.— Reverse and obverse of a fine coin struck at Oxford, 
one of the provincial mints of the king during the Civil War. The reverse bears the "Declaration " of September 
1643, to the effect that the king would preserve the Protestant Religion, the Laws of England, and the Liberty of 
Parliament. Besides £3 in gold, £1 and 10s. pieces in silver were also struck at Oxford 431 

A CUIRASSIER.— From Skelton's Armour 435 

THE CAVALIER AS " ENGLAND'S WOLF."— From a broadside of 1646 speaking of " England's Wolfe, with 
Eagles-claws : the cruell impieties of 'ai<jod-thirsty royalists and blasphemous antiparliamentarians under that 
inhuman Prince Rupert, Digby, and the rest " 436 

THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I.— From a print in Nalson's Journal of the . . . Tryal of King Charles I., 1684. The 
original inscription under this print ends : " The pageant of this mock tribunal is thus presented to your view by 
an eye-and-ear witness of what he saw and heard there " 441 

THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I. IN WHITEHALL (January 30, 1649).— From a print of the year. It shows 

the windows of the Banqueting Hall through one of which Charles stepped on to the execution stage . . .442 

THE WARRANT FOR THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I.— From the original document in the House of Lords . 443 

THE SCOTS KEEP THEIR YOUNG KING'S NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE.— From a broadside of i65r, 
ridiculing the conditions (including the Covenant) which the Presbyterians exacted from the young Prince Charles 
before they offered him the crown in Scotland after the death of Montrose in 1650. Jack Presbyter holds the king's 
nose down, while the Scots, personified as Jockie, turn the grindstone. Underneath are the lines : — 

" Come to the grindstone, Charles, 'tis now too late 
To recolect — 'tis presbitarian late." .... 443 

OLIVER CROMWELL. — After a miniature by Samuel Cooper, perhaps the greatest miniature painter who ever lived. 

This miniature is in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch 450 

CROMWELL EJECTING THE RUMP, 1653.— A Dutch print in the British Museum. Cromwell, supported by Strick- 
land and Cooper, is saying to the members : " Begone, you rogues, you have sate long enough ! " On either side, in 
Dutch and English, is the inscription " This House is to let " 453 

THE GREAT SEAL OF THE COMMONWEALTH, 1651 455-456 

A DINNER-PARTY UNDER THE PROTECTORATE.— From the English edition of the Janua Linguarum reserala 
of Comenius, a famous writer on education, published in 1631. The salt-cellar, making the division of rank at the 
table, is particularly noticeable 459 

RICHARD CROMWELL. — After a miniature painting by Samuel Cooper, the master miniaturist, 1664 . . , 463 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xxv 

PAGE 

UNITE, OR SOVEREIGN, OF THE COMMONWEALTH, 1660.— These coins, which alone among English coins have 
their legends in English, are of a markedly simple type. The sovereign of James I. was first called a " unite," partly 
because they were intended to circulate on both sides of the border 4 6> 

CHARLES II. — From the engraving by Vanderbanc .gg 

EDMUND HYDE, EARL CLARENDON.— From an engraving after the portrait by David Loggan, an exquisite 

drawing in pencil on vellum. Loggan died in 1700 .- 

A VIEW OF LONDON AT THE TIME OF THE GREAT FIRE.— From a print by Visscher. Taken from 

Bankside, Southwark .7, 

SOUTHWARK, LONDON BRIDGE, THE CITY AND THE TOWER, IN 1666.— From Visscher's General View of 

London, a long, finely-engraved panoramic print .... 475 

AN ENGLISH SHIP OF WAR, TEMP. CHARLES II.— From a medal. A type of the ship for which Pepys, as 

Secretary to the Admiralty, was responsible ' .-g 

" DR. OATES DISCOVERETH THE PLOT TO YE KING AND COUNCIL."— From one of a series of playing 

cards of 1684 in the British Museum .g 

CONTEMPORARY MEDAL OF THE GODFREY MURDER.— One of several medals struck during the general 
frenzy of the " Popish Plot " following on the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Supernatural events were 
associated with Godfrey's death, and he is represented as walking after he was dead and, on reverse of the medal 
as carrying his own head ' „ 

ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL, MARQUIS OF ARGYLL.— From the painting by George Jamesone . . . .485 

JAMES II. — After the engraved portrait by Giffart „ 

THE SEVEN BISHOPS. — From a medal struck in honour of the petitioning Bishops ; in the British Museum. On 
the obverse is Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury. The Bishop of London is included, though he was not a 
petitioner 49 7 

THE EMBARKATION OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE FOR ENGLAND, 1688.— After an old print . . . 500 

MEDAL COMMEMORATING THE FLIGHT OF JAMES II 5 o 3 

WILLIAM III . 505 

QUEEN MARY II.— After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller 5 o6 

LONDONDERRY, ABOUT 1680. — From an original drawing of the time in the British Museum .... 5:0 

MEDAL COMMEMORATIVE OF THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE.— William is shown crossing the Boyne at 

the head of his troops „ I2 

THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE, EDINBURGH.— From an engraving by Gordon of Rothiemay about 1650. The 
Parliament House was completed in 1640, and in it the Assemblies of the Estates of Scotland were held until tne 
dissolution of the Parliament by the Act of Union in 1707 - I5 

THE FLEET PRISON. — Used for defendants committed by order of the Star Chamber and later, and more notoriously, 
for debtors. It was rebuilt after the Great Fire, but was destroyed in the Gordon Riots of 1780. It was situated 
in Farringdon Street. From a print of 1691 521 

JOHN SMITH AT THIRTY-SEVEN.— One of the most successful of early English colonial administrators. He was 
head and one of the founders of the Colony of Virginia, which owed much of its prosperity to his efforts. From his 
General History of Virginia, 1624 m r, 2 

THE OLD EAST INDIA HOUSE.— Drawn from an old print by Herbert Railton 537 

A FIRST-RATE MAN-OF-WAR OF 1680.— From a print of that year 541 

THE OLD MERCER'S HALL, WHERE THE BANK OF ENGLAND WAS FIRST ESTABLISHED.— The 
Bank, founded in 1694, was carried on in the Mercer's Hall until 1734, when it removed to its present site in Thread- 
needle Street 5 , 2 

A BEDROOM PARTY OF 1631. — From a print by Abraham Bosse. An illustration of domestic manners in the 

seventeenth century . . 

JOHN MILTON 545 

JOHN DRYDEN. — From the engraving after Kneller's portrait 546 

HEAD-PIECE FROM THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 1662 54 g 

QUEEN ANNE.— After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller 550 

JOHN CHURCHILL, DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH.— After the painting by Van der Werff 55 2 

THE ALLIED FORCES GOING INTO ACTION AT RAMILLIES .-From a medal struck to commemorate the 

^tory 561 

A MEDAL CELEBRATING THE FRENCH DEFEAT AT OUDENARDE.— The obverse represents Marlborough 

and Eugene as Castor and Pollux, while the reverse gives a view of the town and of the battle .... 562 

QUEEN ANNE CLIPPING THE WINGS OF THE GALLIC COCK.— A contemporary caricature celebrating 

the eclipse of Louis XIV. in the War of the Spanish Succession 563 



xxvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A HIGH CHURCH CARICATURE ON THE SACHEVERELL PROSECUTION, 1710 — Entitled " Like coach- 
man, like cause, or what we must expect if Low Church becomes uppermost." Cromwell rides in the carriage, 
with the devil driving ; Hoadley is postilion 565 

A HACKNEY COACH, ABOUT 1710.— Hackney coaches were first established in London in 1625. About the time 

of the Sheriff's table of fares from which the cut is taken there were over 700 in London 569 

GEORGE I. — From the painting by Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery 571 

A CARICATURE OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTH SEA COMPANY, 1720 579 

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. — From the painting by J. B. Vanloo, a French painter who worked in England from 1737 

to 1742. The painting is in the National Portrait Gallery 582 

QUEEN CAROLINE, CONSORT OF GEORGE II 584 

GEORGE II.— After the painting by R. E. Pine 587 

COSTUME OF THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.— A group taken from Nicholl's View of Hampden Court 588 

A SATIRE ON WALPOLE AND HIS ADMINISTRATION, ABOUT 1738.— From a print in the British Museum. 
The composition includes Walpole, who is waving away Captain Jenkins's complaint about his severed ear (p. 592), a 
Frenchman offering jewels to Walpole's wife, a courtier ejecting a man with a petition against the " Spanish de- 
predations," a dog destroying the Merchants' Complaint, and a financier pouring gold through a gridiron into the 
Sinking Fund 590 

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1742.— From a fine drawing by H. F. Gravelot, a French artist, who did much 
English book-illustration in the middle of the eighteenth century. Engraved by W. J. White. Sir Robert Walpole 
is addressing the House 595 

THE DESPAIRING FRENCHMAN AT LOUISBOURG.— From a drawing by Boitard, a French caricaturist, of the 

blockade of Louisbourg, on the St. Lawrence, in 1745 596 

EUROPEAN SOVEREIGNS AT MARKET, 1748.— A satire on the re-arrangements following the Treaty of Aix-Ia- 
Chapelle. The King of France sells hostages, George II. turnips from Hanover (Hanover was nicknamed " Turnip 
Garden "), the Stadtholder gin, and the Kings of Sweden and Sardinia then soldiers as mercenaries .... 597 

LORD CLIVE IN LATER YEARS.— After the painting by Gainsborough, about 1773 607 

GENERAL JAMES WOLFE 626 

SURAJ UD-DAULAH, NAWAB OF BENGAL.— From a contemporary group-painting of the Nawab by Kettle, 

belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society 630 

GEORGE III. IN 1767. — From the painting by Allan Ramsay in the National Portrait Gallery 636 

A SATIRE OF 1762 ON BUTE AND HIS ADMINISTRATION.— From an etching by the Marquis Townshend, 
who became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1767. He was one of the keenest critics of the blundering government of 
Bute, and, deriding Hogarth, who was a supporter of the Government, signs himself " Oh ! Garth " . . . 639 

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM.— From the painting by Richard Brompton 648 

A VIEW OF BOSTON IN NEW ENGLAND AND BRITISH SHIPS OF WAR LANDING THEIR TROOPS.— 
From a print " engraved, printed, and sold by Paul Revere, Boston," 1768. This was the first demonstration of 
force by the home Government 651 

WILKES ASSURING GEORGE III. THAT HE HAD NEVER BEEN A WILKITE.— From the caricature by 
Gillray. After his contests with the Government and the House of Commons, Wilkes rose to various offices, and in 
1774 became Lord Mayor of London. The caricature is based on his remark to the king, concerning his legal ad- 
viser, " Ah, sir ! he was a Wilkite, which I never was " 653 

GEORGE WASHINGTON.— After the painting by Trumbull 661 

AN AMERICAN TWENTY-DOLLAR BILL PRIOR TO THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE . . 662 

THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR SIGNATURES TO THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE . . .664 

GIBRALTAR BEFORE THE GREAT SIEGE OF 1780.— From a print by Coquart 670 

AN AMERICAN GENERAL.— From Barnard's History of England, 1790 672 

ADMIRAL SIR GEORGE RODNEY.— After the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds 673 

ASAF UD-DAULAH, WAZIR OF OUDH.— Taken from an engraving of a contemporary painting by Home be- 
longing to the Royal Asiatic Society 681 

WARREN HASTINGS.— After the portrait, made late in Hastings's life, by Sir Thomas Lawrence 682 

LORD NORTH 683 

" ENGLAND MADE ODIOUS, OR THE FRENCH DRESSERS."— A caricature on Shelburne and Fox at the 

time of the arrangement of the Treaty of Versailles (1783), which was exceedingly unpopular 685 

THE IRISH PARLIAMENT HOUSE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.— Now the Bank of Ireland. The 

building was commenced in 1729, but was not brought to its present state until 1805 690 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xxvii 

PAGE 

HENRY FLOOD. — From a contemporary drawing by J. Comerford. Flood entered the Irish Parliament in 1759, at 
the age of twenty-seven, and became a minister of the Crown in 1775. According to Lecky he was " beyond all 
comparison the greatest popular orator that his country had yet produced " and " a master of parliamentary tactics " 693 

A TYPICAL " STRIP " FARM OR OPEN FIELD.— A plan of " strip " holdings at Laxton, Northants, which con- 
tinued to be farmed in the old way until the end of the nineteenth century. See the note on the illustration on 
page 256 6 9 5 

AN OLD HAND WEAVER AT HIS LOOM.— From the Universal Magazine, 1747 698 

THE CANAL AQUEDUCT OVER THE IRWELL.— One of the successful canal schemes of the Duke of Bridge- 
water aid his engineer, James Brindley. The canal crossed the Irwell at Barton, Lancashire, at a height of 40 feet. 
From a print issued in 1793 6gg 

ADAM SMITH. — From the medallion portrait in enamel by James Tassie, a famous gem engraver and enameller . . 70I 

DR. JOHNSON. — From an engraving by Finden 703 

ALEXANDER POPE. — From a crayon drawing in the Bodleian Library 703 

AN "EXQUISITE" OF 1720 704 

HENRY FIELDING.— By Hogarth, from the 1772 edition of Fielding's Works 705 

THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM PITT.— Pitt entered Parliament two years after the death of his father, the Earl of 

Chatham, and became Prime Minister three years later at the age of twenty-five. After the portrait by Gainsborough 708 

" THE RAREE SHOW." — A caricature by Gillray published in 1797, when there were loud complaints of the burden of 
taxation and against Pitt's foreign policy. Pitt is represented as a showman picking John Bull's pocket while his 
attention is occupied with the show 709 

PITT AVERTING THE PARTITION OF TURKEY BY CATHERINE OF RUSSIA.— An adaptation of a scene 
from the Taming of the Shrew (Act v. Sc. 2) to the British intervention between Russia and Turkey. Austria and 
France support Catherine, while Prussia and Holland back Pitt 713 

EDMUND BURKE.— After the painting by Romney 715 

" BLOOD ON THUNDER." — Chancellor Thurlow, sometimes called the " Thunderer," was a firm supporter of 
Warren Hastings during his impeachment. Gillray seized the opportunity for this caricature, published in 1788, 
called "Blood on Thunder fording the Red Sea," representing Hastings carried on Thurlow's shoulders through a 
sea of blood strewn with Hindu corpses 718 

TIPPU SULTAN OF MYSORE.— From an Oriental painting at Apsley House which belonged to the Duke of 

Wellington 720 

LORD CORNWALLIS 721 

NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. — From the unfinished painting by David of Buonaparte as a young officer . . . 726 

"THE GREATEST GENERAL OF THE AGE— GENERAL COMPLAINT."— From a caricature of 1796 by 

Woodward 727 

" A MODEL OFFICER." — From Rowlandson's caricature published in 1796, under the title " Anything will do for an 

Officer," when dissatisfaction was rife at the state of the army and at the purchase system in particular . . . 728 

ADMIRAL DUNCAN.— After the portrait by Hoppner ." 729 

" GRANDFATHER " GEORGE WITH THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.— From a print by Woodward which 
appeared at the birth of a daughter to the Princess of Wales in 1796. It was entitled " Grandpapa in his Glory," 
one of many satires of the day on the homely habits of George III 730 

SERINGAPATAM, TIPPU'S CAPITAL, STORMED IN 1799.— Taken from a view in Home's Mysore, 

Madras, 1794 736 

GEORGE III. — After the painting by Sir William Beechev, representing the king in an admiral's uniform . . . 743 

THE DOUBLE-HEADED GOVERNMENT.— A French caricature of the alliance of Pitt and Fox. From Jaime's 

Musee de la Caricature "» 745 

LORD NELSON.— After the painting by Sir William Beechey, R.A 747 

ADMIRAL LORD COLLINGWOOD.— After an engraving by Charles Turner, A.R.A 748 

THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON.— After the painting by Delaroche 752 

SIR JOHN MOORE. — From an engraving after a sketch portrait 755 

BADAJOZ AND ITS CITADEL, FROM THE NORTH BANK OF THE RIVER GUADIANA— From a view 

taken in 1813 760 

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.— After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.S.A 768 

THE CHATEAU OF HOUGOUMONT AFTER THE BATTLE.— From a drawing by S. Wharton made in i8r5 . 772 

LORD CASTLE RE AGH.— After the portrait by Lawrence 775 

CATO STREET, THE SCENE OF THE CONSPIRACY OF 1820.— From a contemporary drawing . . .780 



xxviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

GEORGE CANNING.— After the portrait by Lawrence s ... 783 

GEORGE IV. — From a sketch made at Ascot Races, 1828 » . . . 788 

WILLIAM IV 790 

BOMBAY FORT, ABOUT 1825.— From a drawing by William Westall, A.R.A 797 

THE EXTENDED DRESS OF 1789 < 802 

" ROYAL AFFABILITY." — Gillray rarely let pass an opportunity of caricaturing George III. ; here he pictures him 

walking with the queen in the neighbourhood of his Windsor farm and accosting a labourer 804 

" FARMER " GEORGE. — Another of Gillray's prints. The king was known generally by this title .... 805 

THE FIRST STEAMBOAT, THE COMET, ON THE CLYDE.— From a print of 1812 807 

STEPHENSON'S LOCOMOTIVE, THE "ROCKET" . 808 

ROBERT BURNS.— From the portrait by Nasmyth 809 

SIR WALTER SCOTT.— After the painting by Raeburn 811 

LORD SHAFTESBURY.— From the portrait by Millais 817 

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1837.— After a painting by W. C. Ross 820 

SIR ROBERT PEEL MOVING THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS (January 1846).— From a sketch 

made in the House of Commons 825 

LORD JOHN RUSSELL.— From a drawing in the " Maclise Portrait Gallery " 827 

THE MONSTER CHARTIST MEETING ON KENNINGTON COMMON (April io, 1848).— From a print in 

the Illustrated London News of 1848, made after a daguerrotype 828 

DANIEL O'CONNELL.— After a painting by T. Garrick 833 

GOLD-SEEKERS AT BATHURST, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, ON THEIR WAY TO THE FIELDS AT 

OPHIR.— From a print published at Sydney, N.S.W., in 185 1 839 

PORT NATAL IN 1852 843 

DOST MOHAMMED 847 

OPEN COACHES ON THE MANCHESTER AND LIVERPOOL RAILWAY.— From a print of 1831 . . .852 

ROBERT OWEN 853 

DR. PUSEY— From a photograph 855 

THE EARL OF ABERDEEN.— From a sketch made in the House of Lords in 1854 857 

THE BRITISH FORCES MARCHING TO THE ATTACK AT THE BATTLE OF THE ALMA.— From a sketch 

by a lieutenant of a ship stationed in the river during the battle 860 

LORD RAGLAN. — From a drawing made by Edward Armitage, R.A., in 1854 861 

PORT AND TOWN OF SEVASTOPOL, SHOWING THE FORTS, IN 1854.— The port is a bay four miles long 
and one mile wide at the entrance, and having also a military harbour one and a half miles long, which is landlocked. 
The principal forts, Fort Constantine and Fort Alexander, are seen on the left and right of the drawing. The town 
was bombarded from the sea and from hills behind that could be occupied. Yet so well were the defences arranged 

that it sustained a siege of eleven months 862 

NANA SAHIB.— From a sketch made in India in 1857 868 

SIR JOHN LAWRENCE 869 

THE MEMORIAL WELL AT CAWNPORE 870 

SIR HENRY HA VELOCK.— After the portrait by Frederick Goodall, R.A 871 

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1857.— From a pastel painting by Alexander Blaikley 873 

BENJAMIN DISRAELI.— From an early portrait in the "Maclise Portrait Gallery" ...... 874 

THE CAPTURE OF THE NORTH FORT AT PIHO, i860.— From a sketch made on the spot . . .877 

LORD PALMERSTON.— From a photograph 879 

THE A LAB AM A— From a sketch by Charles W. Wyllie 882 

CHARLES DARWIN. — From a medallion by Alphonse Legros , . ... 889 

MR. GLADSTONE IN 1869.— From a photograph 895 

W. E. FORSTER.— From a photograph by Elliot & Fry ...'... 897 

THE BRITISHl RESIDENCY, KABUL, AFTER THE RISING OF 1879 9°6 



AND HISTORICAL NOTES xxix 

PAGE 

SIR FREDERICK (LORD) ROBERTS IN 1880.— From a photograph 907 

CETEWAYO 9I0 

THE MONUMENT AT PAARDEKRAAL, KRUGERSDORP, WHERE THE BOERS PROCLAIMED THE 

INDEPENDENCE OF THE TRANSVAAL IN 1880 QI2 

MAJUBA HILL gl3 

C. S. PARNELL. — From a photograph q™ 



ARABI PASHA 



915 



OSMAN DIGNA, LEADER OF THE MAHDI'S FORCES— From a photograph 916 

GENERAL GORDON.— From a photograph q l7 

MR. A. J. BALFOUR.— An early portrait by Lafayette, Dublin 922 

LORD SALISBURY.— From a photograph by Russell & Sons 925 

MR. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.— From a drawing by W. Hodgson, 1895 930 

THE SURRENDER OF GENERAL CRONJE AT PAARDEBERG.— From a photograph by R. Thieie, by per- 
mission of the Graphic .................. 937 

THE PALACE OF THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF THE SUDAN AT KHARTUM 941 

QUEEN VICTORIA.— From a photograph by Bassano 943 

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.— After the painting by G. F. Watts 947 

KING EDWARD VII.— After a photograph by Lafayette, Dublin 949 

MR. JOHN MORLEY in 1894 . , * ... B .... 957 

KING GEORGE V.— After a photograph by Lafayette , 9$o 



LIST OF MAPS 



* The starred maps have been taken, by the kind permissioti of the Cambridge University Press, from 
their School History of England {by the same author). 

PAGE 

♦SAXON ENGLAND .... 13 

THE BATTLE OF SENLAC 37 

•ENGLAND AND THE LOWLANDS OF SCOTLAND UNDER NORMANS AND PLANTAGENETS.— Covering 

English history from the Conquest to the later part of the fifteenth century 52 

EUROPE, ABOUT 1200 95 

*THE BATTLEFIELDS OF ENGLISH AND SCOTS IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES 135 

THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN 143 

THE BATTLE OF CRE£Y 157 

♦FRANCE AND THE ANGEVIN DOMINION . 162 

ENGLAND IN THE REIGN OF EDWARD III 168 

DISPOSITION OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH FORCES AT AGINCOURT 196 

♦IRELAND UNDER THE TUDORS 258 

THE BATTLE OF FLODDEN 264 

♦ENGLAND AND THE LOWLANDS OF SCOTLAND IN TUDOR AND STUART TIMES . . . .285 

DRAKE'S VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD, 1577-1580 336 

♦THE LOW COUNTRIES AND PICARDY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 343 

EUROPEAN POWERS IN 1610 " 393 

ROYALIST AND ROUNDHEAD IN THE CIVIL WAR 439 

THE SEDGEMOOR CAMPAIGN, 1685 493 

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM 553 

THE CAMPAIGNS OF MARLBOROUGH 564 

THE MARCH OF THE JACOBITES 599 

A CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF CULLODEN 601 

THE PRUSSIAN AREA OF THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 619 

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 627 

THE BATTLE OF PLASSEY — From a plan published in 176 633 

NORTH AMERICA 644 

THE WEST INDIES, THE SCENE OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH NAVAL OPERATIONS, 1778-1779 . . 669 

INDIA AND THE BRITISH DOMINION IN 1785 677 

EUROPE, 1789-1794 712 

THE BATTLE OF THE NILE IN ABOUKIR BAY (August 1, 1798) 732 

♦THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR 749 

♦THE SPANISH PENINSULA, SHOWING THE AREA AND CENTRES OF THE WAR OF 1808-1813 . . 757 

THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN « 769 

♦WATERLOO: THE OPPOSING ARMIES s 770 

xxx 



LIST OF MAPS xxxi 

PAG2 

WATERLOO: THE CRISIS ...... - ..,,,.... 773 

INDIA IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY ...... f ... . 795 

THE DOMINION OF CANADA 836 

AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA 8 38 

NEW ZEALAND ... 840 

SOUTH AFRICA 842 

THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA 859 

INDIA IN 1857 865 



THE TERRACE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF SOUTH AFRICA 
EGYPT AMD THE SUDAN 



935 
943 



BRITISH POSSESSIONS IN AFRICA, 1903 957 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE TO-DAY 963 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES 

PAGE 

THE FAMILY OF ALFRED THE GREAT 10 

WESSEX KINGS OF ENGLAND 23 

THE LATER LINE OF ALFRED 32 

THE NORMAN LINE .,,...,.. 67 

THE SCOTS KINGS , 78 

THE BLOOD ROYAL OF ALFRED 81 

FOUR GENERATIONS OF PLANTAGENETS 84 

THE SCOTTISH CROWN 1291 133 

THE LANCASTERS 146 

THE FRENCH CROWN 153 

THE BRUCES AND STEWARTS , , 185 

THE HOUSES OF YORK AND LANCASTER , # 194 

THE BEAUFORTS AND STAFFORDS , 202 

DESCENDANTS OF JOHN OF GAUNT • . . 241 

DESCENDANTS OF RICHARD OF YORK , . 242 

DESCENDANTS OF HENRY VII. ... 346 

THE SUCCESSION AFTER CHARLES II .,.,«« 482 

THE SPANISH SUCCESSION ...-».»*»..» s ... 526 

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION . ..'»»»«,».,,,,'. 576 

THE HANOVERIANS , , . f 5 8 4 



THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION 



593 



LIST OF PLATES 



QUEEN ELIZABETH Frontispiece 

From the painting attributed to Marcus Gheeraedts in the National Portrait Gallery. 

FACIXG PAGE 

ST. DUNSTAN, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY . 26 

From a late twelfth century MS. in the British Museum. 

KEEP OF CASTLE RISING, BUILT BETWEEN 1140 AND 1150 . . . .70 

The architectural design of a Norman keep, as distinguished from the commoner 
" shell-keep," was of a fairly obvious kind, consisting of a quadrangular tower sur- 
rounded by a water-filled moat or a deep ditch. As it was upon the solidity of their 
walls that the early castles depended for their capacity to withstand assault, and not 
upon cleverly contrived fortifications, they were built with walls of enormous thickness 
(sometimes as much as 25 feet at the bottom and 10 feet at the top), regard being had 
to the comparatively small dimensions of the building as a whole. One small doorway, 
defended by a drawbridge and portcullis, gave admission. 

EFFIGIES OF HENRY II. AND HIS QUEEN ELEANOR 82 

Originally with other royal tombs in the nave of Fontrevault Abbey, these and 
two other royal effigies (those of Richard I. and his queen) were the only royal tombs 
in the Abbey that escaped destruction at the Revolution. Henry's effigy is of sand- 
stone ; that of Eleanor of wood. 

DRAWINGS FROM AN EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY MS. BY MATTHEW 

PARIS 104 

Paris's Chronicles give a more vivid impression of his age than the writings of any 
other English chronicler ; for a portion of the reign of Henry III. he is our only source 
of information. Paris was the chief figure in the remarkable school of MS. scribes and 
illuminators which was centred at St. Albans in the thirteenth century. As an historio- 
grapher and draughtsman he brought his Abbey wide fame. The drawings given are 
taken from a kind of commonplace book containing Lives of the Offas, stories of the 
Abbots of St. Albans, and documents and other material for his great Histories. The 
text has considerable corrections in Paris's own hand, and if the drawings are not 
certainly his, they were made under his directions, and perhaps from his sketches. 

ENGLISH LIFE IN THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY 164 

These drawings from the beautiful psalter made for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (who died 
in 1 345) are examples of some of the finest English MS. illumination. In the upper half 
the household is preparing a great feast, John de Brigford, the cook, being seen in the 
rignt-hand top corner and the family bag-pipe player, who patrolled the table during 
the feast, immediately beneath him. Below, corn in the sheaf is being stacked, beaten 
with the flail, and an old woman brings a sack of threshed corn to the miller. 

JOHN BALL HARANGUING A CROWD OF REBELS 176 

From an illumination in a fifteenth century MS. of Sir John Froissart's Chronicles 
of England. Ball is addressing Wat Tyler and his insurgents in a market-place of 
rather an imaginary kind. Froissart's writings were greatly appreciated by his own 
age (he died about 1410), and many copies of his Chronicles were made and illuminated 
in France. 

xxxiii (• 



xxxiv LIST OF PLATES 

FACING PAGE 

THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH UNDER HENRY VI 250 

One of four illuminations taken from an abridgment of English law of the time 
of Henry VI. Below the five judges are the King's Coroner and Attorney, and the 
Masters of the Court ; standing on a table two ushers are swearing in the jury ; at the 
bar a prisoner stands in custody of a tip-staff and in the foreground other prisoners 
wait their trial. The illuminations are in the Library of the Inner Temple. 

QUEEN ANNE BOLEYN AND THE LADY MARY, AFTERWARDS QUEEN MARY 286 
Two of the famous collection of eighty-seven drawings by Holbein at Windsor 
Castle. Holbein displayed to an extraordinary degree a power for seizing the character 
of his sitter and rendering the features without flattery ; and while, in his paintings, 
he spared no labour or finish, he never lost thereby any resemblance or expression. The 
drawings, made between his arrival in England in 1528 and his death in 1543 (he was 
portrait painter to Henry VIII. after 1537) are sketches for paintings that still exist or 
have been lost. 

THE ENCAMPMENT OF THE ENGLISH FORCES NEAR PORTSMOUTH, 1545 294 

Taken from an engraving of one of the fresco paintings executed, at Cowdray 
Castle about 1 5 50 and destroyed by fire in 1 793. This and other important paintings of 
the same date were fortunately engraved by the Society of Antiquaries shortly before the 
fire. 

THE ENGLISH FIRE-SHIPS SENT INTO THE SPANISH ARMADA AT ANCHOR 

OFF CALAIS 348 

From an engraving of one of a series of tapestries executed to the order of the Earl 
of Nottingham (Lord Howard of Effingham), Lord High Admiral, which were destroyed 
with the old House of Lords in the fire of 1834. 

CHARLES 1 398 

From the original painting by Van Dyck at Windsor. The equerry standing 
beside the king is M. St. Antoine who was sent over by Henry IV. of France. 

"THE TRUE MANNER OF THE TRYAL" and of "THE EXECUTION OF 

THOMAS, EARLE OF STRAFFORD " 424 

Two fine etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1641. In the trial picture the " knights, 
cittizens and burgesses of the howse of Commons " are massed on either side, with 
" earles " in two rows in front of them ; Strafford stands in a gown and hood in a dock 
in the centre of the foreground with the Lieutenant of the Tower beside him. In the 
background is the King's seat of state (empty — the King and Queen are in a kind of 
Royal box behind), immediately in front of which sits the Lord High Steward, the 
Earl of Arundel, having the Judges and Barons of the Exchequer and the Masters of 
the Chancery grouped in front of him. In the execution scene Strafford has his head 
on the block, and round him are standing the Primate of Ireland, the Sheriffs of London, 
and his kindred and friends. The view gives an interesting picture of the Tower in the 
seventeenth century. 

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTEENTH 

CENTURY 444 

From a Dutch print engraved, probably, in 1649 ; one of a set of three setting 
forth " The manner in which the British sovereign assembles his Parliament," " The 
manner and order of sitting of the lower house, or commons, which consists of knights, 
gentlemen and burgesses," and of the sitting of the Lords. The interest in English 
parliamentary methods aroused on the Continent during the struggle of the King and the 
Parliament called forth many prints of this kind. 



LIST OF PLATES xxxv 

FACING PAGE 

THE ATTACK ON CHATHAM BY THE DUTCH IN 1667 47 2 

The burning of the dockyard at Chatham and of ships of the line lying in the Medway 
by the Dutch under De Ruyter in June, 1667, was one of the most remarkable incidents 
in the remarkable wars with the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The balance of 
the advantage during 1666 lay with the Dutch, and in spite of an English victory at 
Terschelting, the King's neglect of the navy (only a light naval force was kept at sea to 
damage Dutch trade) rendered it impossible to oppose any considerable force to De 
Ruyter's powerful fleet, which easily forced the entrance to the Thames and the Medway 
and threw London into a panic. 

THE LANDING OF WILLIAM III. AT BRIXHAM, TORBAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1688 500 
From a painting by an unknown artist at Hampton Court Palace. Every detail 
of the landing as described by Macaulay is shown. The original of the print repro- 
duced on p. 500 is a companion painting, also at Hampton Court. 

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM (OR HOCHSTAEDT), AUGUST 13, 1704 . . . 554 

From a print by John van Huchtenburgh, a Dutch painter whose work was much 
admired by Prince Eugene and William III., by whose choice he was commissioned to 
depict the battles of Marlborough's wars. A reference to the map on p. 553 will render 
clear the position of the opposing armies. On the left is the Danube, on the banks of 
which the village of Blenheim in flames is seen, and Tallard's troops in flight, pursued 
by the English. 

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS UNDER SIR ROBERT WALPOLE'S ADMINISTRATION 582 

From an engraving of the painting by Hogarth and his father-in-law, Sir James 
Thornhill. Walpole stands to the left of the Speaker, Arthur Onslow. 

A VIEW OF THE TAKING OF QUEBEC, SEPTEMBER 13, 1759 . . . .628 

From a print published in the same year " shewing the manner of debarking the 
English Forces and of the resolute scrambling of the Light Infantry up a woody 
precipice to dislodge the Captain's post which defended a small entrenched path through 
which the troops were to pass ; also a view of the signal victory obtained over the 
French regulars, Canadians and Indians, which produced the surrender of Quebec." 

PART OF A PANORAMIC VIEW OF BOSTON AND THE COUNTRY ROUND AT 

THE TIME OF THE BATTLE OF BUNKER'S HILL 662 

Taken from the original water-colour drawing made by a lieutenant of the British 
army directly after the battle. The upper part looks towards Cambridge and shows 
some of the American works ; the lower shows, on the right, the ruins of Charlestown 
and Bunker's Hill (4), part of North Boston being in the foreground. The latter 
view covers the area of the battle. 

HORATIO, VISCOUNT NELSON 732 

After the painting by Hoppner in the state apartments of St. James's Palace, where 
the finest of his portraits are collected. 

GEORGE IV. AND HIS TRAIN AT HIS CORONATION IN 182 1 . . . -782 

From one of a series of paintings by Stephanoff made by the king's order. This 
was the last of the coronations at which the utmost pomp and display, regardless of 
expense, was shown. The coronation of George IV., an unpopular monarch, cost 
£243,000, while that of his successor cost only a little over £45,000, and that of Queen 
Victoria about £70,000. 



xxxvi LIST OF PLATES 

FACING PAGE 

GREAT COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE, IN 1857 AND 1912 . . . .838 

From a book of views of Victoria published in 1857 and from a photograph lent 
by the courtesy of the Agent-General for Victoria. 

BOMBAY FROM MALABAR HILL IN 1800 AND IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 872 
From a print published in 1 800 and from a photograph. 

WINNIPEG IN 1870 AND IN 1912 . 888 

The early view is from an original painting, made in 1870, lent by the Canadian 
Department of the Interior and, contrasted with the modern view, gives an idea of 
the extraordinary development of the city. 



*- • 



A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH 

NATION 



BOOK I 

NATION MAKING 

CHAPTER I 
FROM C.ESAR TO ALFRED 

I 

CELTIC BRITAIN AND THE ROMAN OCCUPATION 

The British Isles first come in contact with the general current of history 
in the year 55 B.C." In that year Julius Caesar, then engaged in the subjuga- 
tion of Gaul, thought fit to cross the Channel with a military force, doubtless 
in the hope of finding that he could add to his resources for the achievement 
of his personal empire. He spent only a short time in the island, and re- 
turned again the next year with larger forces. But he found the prospect 
less promising than he had anticipated ; and having no wish to extend the 
boundaries of the Roman dominion except as a means to more important 
ends, he again retired without making any serious attempt at subjugation ; 
and for the next hundred years the Romans left Britain alone. 

But nearly three centuries before Julius Caesar the Greek voyager, Pytheas 
of Massilia, had visited the British coast and had spoken of its inhabitants by 
the name of Pretanes, which, according, to the best authorities, is a Celtic term 
meaning the " painted people," and of this term the later title of Britanni 
was probably a corruption. There can be no doubt that they were the same 
race who, at the coming of Julius Caesar, were in the habit of painting or 
possibly tattooing themselves with woad. 

It is generally agreed that the dominant races and languages were 
Celtic, akin to those of Gaul. Further it is tolerably clear that there were 
two or perhaps three waves of Celtic invasion, since two Celtic stocks at 
least can be definitely distinguished. The first, called the Goidelic or Gaelic, 
found before them non-Aryan races commonly named Iberian, who were 
partly driven by them into the more inaccessible parts of the islands, and 

A 



2 NATION MAKING 

partly absorbed by them. The second wave is called Brythonic — the Pre- 
tanes of Pytheas, and the Britanni of the Romans, who treated their 
Goidelic kinsmen very much as these had treated the Iberians. In language, 
at least, there was a very marked distinction between these two waves. In 
effect the Goidels or Gaels were driven into Ireland, the isles, and the 
highlands of Scotland ; while the Brythons occupied England and Wales 
and the Scottish lowlands. The Gaelic of Scotland and the Erse of 
Ireland descend from the Goidelic dialect, while the Welsh, the old Cornish, 
and the Breton tongues descend from the Brythonic. The third wave was 
also Brythonic in character, and seems to have been merely an overflow 
from the continent of Celts nearly akin to the preceding wave, who occupied 
only the southern part of England. When Caesar visited England the 
last wave represented the highest stage of civilisation so far achieved, while 
the rest of the Brythons represented a stage intermediate between that of 
the latest comers and the Gaels. We shall now use the term Briton for 
the non-Gaelic Celts in general. 

It was not till the year A.D. 43 that the Roman Emperor Claudius re- 
I solved to add Britain to the Roman Empire.. In the meantime there had 
' been a not inconsiderable intercourse between the southern Britons and 
the Roman world ; and the Romans learnt a great deal more of the geography 
than had been known to them in Caesar's day. The Roman conquest, of 
course, bore no sort of resemblance to the previous conquests. It was very 
much more analogous to the British conquest of India, which began 
seventeen hundred years later. It was a military occupation, in which the 
conquering race established military centres and military roads, imposed 
taxes, and took upon itself the organisation of government without either 
extirpating or enslaving the natives. The advance was gradual. Within 
the first decade the Roman supremacy was established up to a line drawn 
from the Severn to the Wash. In the eighties the more northern tribes of 
the Brigantes up to the Solway were subdued ; and the Roman Governor 
Agricola carried his arms successfully as far probably as the Tay. 

But though the Roman legions marched through Scotland no practical 
conquest was effected. Agricola routed the highlanders, but that did not 
mean that they were in any sense brought to subjection. In fact, Agricola 
had hardly left the country when even the Brigantes in the north of England 
were again in revolt, showing that the chastisement inflicted upon them had 
only broken them for a time. They were, however, repressed not long after- 
wards. From the last years of the first century Britain, south of the 
Humber and the Mersey, was well under control ; and when Hadrian's 
Wall was built in A.D. 121 and the year following, from Solway to the Tyne, 
the Romans commanded the north up to that line. Twenty years later the 
boundary was carried farther to the wall of Antoninus from Clydemouth to 
the Firth of Forth. But the Roman stations beyond Hadrian's Wall appear 
never to have been more than garrisons planted in a hostile country ; military 
outposts which prevented the northern tribes from gathering in force. On 



4 NATION MAKING 

the whole we may take it that from about the middle of the second century 
the Pax Romana reigned over the land south of Hadrian's Wall so long as the 
Roman occupation endured, but that north of that line the Romans merely 
planted garrisons to hold hostile tribes in check. 

Early in the third century the Emperor Severus conducted in person a 
great campaign in Scotland, in which his troops suffered terribly, though the 
natives could not stand against them ; but immediately after his death the 
Romans again fell back behind Hadrian's Wall, now strengthened by the 
Wall of Severus. 

The whole story of the Roman activity beyond the Solway is curiously 
suggestive of the operations of British troops on the north-west frontier of 
India ; while in Roman Britain, south of the Tyne and Solway, the Roman 
legions preserved peace and the Roman officials conducted the government, 
as do the British in India. And the Roman legions, like the British regi- 
ments, largely consisted of levies drawn from the natives. The country was 
superficially Romanised, adopting a degree of Roman manners and Roman 
culture. On the whole, it would seem that during the third century Britain 
flourished and waxed wealthy, its shores unmolested by foes from over the 
sea, while the unromanised tribes of the north were held securely back by 
the forts of the Roman wall. 

But at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth 
Teutonic sea-rovers begin to put in an appearance. Tribes of the Saxons 
and the Franks took to the sea and to miscellaneous piracy. Here appears 
the picturesque figure of Carausius, who was appointed by the Emperor 
Maximian, the colleague of Diocletian, to the command for the suppression 
of the pirates. The operations of Carausius were successful, but were 
directed to serving his own ambitions ; in fact he set himself up as an 
independent emperor ; and it seems quite possible that he would have 
succeeded in maintaining that position had he not been assassinated. His 
successor Allectus went down before Constantius Chlorus, the father of 
Constantine the Great who transformed Christianity from being the religion 
of a persecuted sect into the dominant creed of the Roman Empire ; and 
the Roman supremacy was again established. Roman Britain continued to 
prosper and was Christianised like the rest of the Roman Empire. But 
the Roman Empire itself was now on the verge of being shattered by the 
Teutonic advance ; and in the year A.D. 410 the Roman legions were re- 
called, and the province of Britain was cut adrift and left to shift for itself. 

Fifty years before the Roman evacuation new names appear for the 
races outside the Roman sphere which were beginning to surge against the 
Roman barriers in Britain as elsewhere. We hear of the Picts and Scots 
and the Attacotti, who, acting sometimes in conjunction with the Saxon 
rovers, began to descend upon the coasts of Britain or dash themselves 
against the Roman wall and even to burst through. " Picts " and " Attacotti " 
must be taken as merely new names for the northern peoples hitherto 
classed together as Caledonians. The Scots, on the other hand, were 



FROM CAESAR TO ALFRED 5 

certainly Gaelic tribes from the north of Ireland, who were presently to 
establish themselves in what is now Argyle, and from the kingdom there 
set up were to extend their name over the whole northern region. But we 
have now reached the point when the character of these peoples outside 
Roman Britain calls for further consideration. 

It has been laid down as a general proposition that the Scottish 
highlands were occupied by Goidelic Celts, Gaels ; and it may further be 
laid down that Galloway, roughly speaking the triangle between the Firths 
of Clyde and Solway, was also mainly occupied by Gaels, not by Brythons, 
whatever may have been the case with the eastern lowlands. Presently 
we shall find Argyle and the Isles in possession of colonies of Scots from 
Ireland. The name of the Attacotti will disappear ; but who were the Picts 
who apparently held sway over the greater part of the country ? The 
ethnological experts are very much at variance on the subject. On the one 
side are those who urged that they were simply Goidelic Celts ; on the 
other side are those who do not recognise them as Aryans at all ; while 
a third, but now wholly discredited, theory attributed to them a Teutonic 
origin. A detailed examination of the question is here impracticable ; but 
perhaps the strongest argument in favour of the non-Aryan theory is the 
indubitable prevalence among them of the tracing of hereditary descent 
through the mother instead of through the father, a practice which is 
affirmed to be non- Aryan. At the same time, although among the Aryan 
races in historic times descent was always traced through the father, there 
are indications tliat this had not always been the case ; and it is quite 
conceivable that in one branch of the great Aryan family the other system 
may have proved victorious. The very inconclusive evidence seems to 
point to the language of the Picts being Gaelic, mainly because Gaelic was 
certainly the language which survived, and there is no definite indication that 
another tongue was spoken. On the whole the presumption is distinctly in 
favour of the Gaelic theory, in spite of the difference between the Pictish 
law of succession and that which prevailed among the Aryan peoples at 
large, including the rest of the Celts, Gaelic as well as Brythonic. 

The position then in the British Islands at the time of the Roman "I 
evacuation may be thus summarised. Ireland had not been touched by J 
the Romans, and was, wholly Celtic, apart from the survival of an Iberian 
element. What we now call Scotland was wholly Celtic, unless it is after 
all true that the Picts were not Aryans at all. Neither Ireland nor Scotland 
was as yet Christianised, and Scotland, too, had been untouched by Roman 
ideas and Roman culture, and had never really been brought under Roman 
domination. On the other hand, the greater part of the larger island, 
practically corresponding to what we now call England and Wales, had 
been under Roman dominion for more than three hundred years ; there 
was probably an actual Roman element in the upper classes ; there was a ^ 
considerable infusion of Roman culture in the towns which had grown up 
at the Roman centres ; Celtic customs had been in some degree modified 



6 NATION MAKING 

by contact with Roman law ; but still the Britons were the least Romanised 
of all the Western peoples who had come under the Roman sway, as may 
be most definitely seen in the fact that the Roman language disappeared, 
whereas in Spain and in Gaul, as well as in Italy, Latin had been so 
thoroughly adopted that it prevailed even over the Teutonic conquerors. 



II 
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 

In A.D. 410 the Roman legions were withdrawn. In the course of the 
next century and a half the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons had made them- 
selves masters of the main part of the greater island between the Forth 
and the Channel, with the exception of the western regions ; for in the 
west the Celtic dominions still stretched in an unbroken line from north 
to south. Some years were still to elapse before the west Saxons in the 
south finally split the Celts of Devon and Cornwall from the Celts of Wales 
after the battle of Deorham j and it was not till 613 that the Angles of the 
North severed Wales from Cumbria or Strathclyde after the battle of Chester. 

For the most part the history of the conquest is obscure and legendary. 
The only record in any sense contemporary is that of the Briton Gildas, 
about the middle of the sixth century ; and he is exceedingly untrustworthy 
except as concerns what came directly under his own personal cognisance. 
Otherwise we have to rely on later compilations, a so-called History of the 
Britons^ written about the end of the seventh century, and edited about 
the beginning of the ninth century by Nennius ; the invaluable work of the 
Venerable Bede, who was born in 673 ; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 
compiled under the auspices of Alfred the Great at the end of the ninth 
century. Bede and the Chroniclers did the best they could with their 
materials ; but trustworthy history does not emerge until the closing years 
of the sixth century, at least as far as details are concerned. 

The traditional story is that Roman Britain went to pieces after the 
withdrawal of the legions, overwhelmed by the incursions of the Picts and 
Scots. In 449 a southern kinglet, Vortigern, called in to his aid the Jute 
pirate chieftains Hengist and Horsa, who, having come to rescue, remained 
to conquer, and were followed by successive swarms of their kinsmen from 
Denmark, Schleswig, and Holland. The helpless Britons who had forgotten 
the art of war were exterminated or fled before them ; though surprising 
legends gathered about a British king named Arthur, who, in his time, smote 
the invaders. King Arthur is the hero who appears in the History of the 
Britons, whereas, according to Gildas, the victor who gave a great check to 
the invaders was Ambrosius Aurelianus. As Gildas himself was probably 
born before the battle of Mount Badon, the great victory which he attributes to 
Aurelianus, it may at least be assumed that his statement is tolerably correct. 

Very little value is to be attached to the History of the Britons, although 



FROM C^SAR TO ALFRED 7 

King Arthur may, on the whole, be accepted as having been a real 
chief, who performed real deeds of prowess. Still, between Gildas, 
who represents the Britons in the middle of the sixth century, Bede, who 
was a careful and critical historian, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which 
stands broadly for Bede modified by Wessex tradition, we can arrive at a 
tolerably consistent account of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest. But before we 
follow the story of the conquest we may consider the character of the 
invading hordes. 

The group of tribes known by the three names Saxons, Angles, and 
Jutes all belonged to the Teutonic stock; the Jutes perhaps being nearer 
akin to the Gothic and Scandinavian branch than to the German. It is 
doubtful whether there was any real distinction between Angles and Saxons 
other than the designation of the territory from which they started. They, 
at any rate, were thoroughly German, and there is no legitimate ground 
for doubting that their development while still on the European Continent 
was on the lines depicted in the Germania of Tacitus. The basis of the 
German community was kinship, whether real or fictitious ; that is to say, 
the tribe regarded itself as an aggregate of families having a common 
ancestry. The tribesmen were freemen, which meant that they owned 
the soil of their settlements ; that they had the right to carry arms, and 
the right of attending the assemblies, local or tribal, which were the courts 
of justice and the parliaments of the village, the district, the tribe, and the 
tribal federation. _, Kingship was an institution which was apparently only 
beginning to develop sporadically among the frontier tribes in the time of 
Tacitus. Normally there was no king, but there was a recognised aristo- 
cracy of high-born families, from among whom a war-lord was appointed 
with the approval of the tribal assembly when the tribe went to war. The 
tendency, however, was for the war-lord to retain his authority when the war 
was over ; and next, for the office itself to become hereditary in the family, 
though without recognition of the rule of primogeniture. The German 
had two main occupations, fighting and agriculture. Instead of concen- 
trating in cities, like the Aryans of the Mediterranean regions, the tribes 
were collections of agricultural communities ; and besides the free tribes- 
men there was a subject or servile population, mainly consisting of captive 
foes or their offspring, who had no rights and no property of their own. 
It is matter of dispute whether in the fifth century the land occupied by 
each community was already looked upon as the permanent property of 
the individual households or was regarded as the common property of 
the community, the individual family being entitled only to the produce 
of that portion annually allotted to it. 

Now in the fifth century the tribes from the east were pressing upon 
the western tribes, and the western tribes were pressing upon the barriers 
of the Roman Empire. We have already seen that those who lived by 
the sea were starting upon a career of freebooting and piracy, even as early 
as the end of the third century, and that Saxons were joining with Picts 



8 NATION MAKING 

and Scots in raiding Roman Britain in the latter half of the fourth century. 
Up to this time and for some while longer they were satisfied with raiding 
for booty, and did not begin to attempt territorial conquest across the sea — 
precisely as happened with the Danes and Norsemen four centuries after- 
wards. But it would seem that even in the earlier half of the fifth century 
the need for expansion on the one hand, and the pressure from the east 
on the other, impelled adventurous spirits to seek not only booty but new 
lands to settle in. This migratory movement, however, was not that of a 
consolidated nation, or at first even of consolidated tribes, but of adven- 
turers who as war-lords gathered kindred spirits to their standards, and set 
forth to carve out new dominions for themselves in lands which offered a 
tempting prey to the spoiler. 

Such a land was Britain after the Roman evacuation. The idea that the 
Britons had wholly forgotten all that pertains to the art of war under the 
Roman dominion is not tenable, for the legions in the country were largely 
recruited from the Britons themselves. But the withdrawal of the Romans 
left the country without any centralised government. It fell back on the 
traditional Celtic system of petty principalities, generally incapableof con- 
sistent united action, and thus it became a prey to the invader. There is 
no reason to throw over the tradition which brings Hengist and Horsa to 
Kent as the hired allies of a British chief, prince, or king. When the grow- 
ing anarchy had revealed itself, it was natural that the new comers should 
have taken up the idea of making themselves masters of the soil and calling 
fresh volunteers to their aid. 

Now, as to the course of the conquest, there is a considerable difference 
between the Anglo-Saxon tradition, as it survived in Wessex to be written 
down in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the ninth century, and the British 
tradition current in the middle of the sixth century as set forth by Gildas 
little more than a hundred years after the conquest began. The Chronicle 
describes a very gradual conquest effected by successive hosts of invaders 
who established a footing at different points along the whole coast line at 
various dates through a long series of years. Gildas describes, on the other 
hand, a sudden storm devastating the country from end to end. Yet the two 
stories can be reasonably reconciled in a manner which accords with such 
evidence as excavation gives us. Probably there was a storm which swept 
over the whole east and south in the latter half of the fifth century, in the 
course of which the Roman cities were permanently ruined. The force 
of the flood was broken by a rally of the Britons and the great victory of 
Ambrosius Aurelianus at Mount Badon, which appears to have taken place at 
some date between 493 and 516. The wave rolled back, but the territory 
was only partially reoccupied, the British being incapable of a constructive 
reorganisation ; and there followed the more systematic organisation and ad- 
vance of the kingdoms set up by the Teutonic invaders on the coasts from the 
Forth to the Isle of Wight. 

Now we may conveniently apply the name English which ultimately 



FROM CESAR TO ALFRED 9 

predominated to the whole group of the Teutonic invaders, Jutes, Angles, 
and Saxons. Saxons and Jutes entered upon the new land by way of the 
coast of Essex, the Thames, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire ; while the Angles 
established themselves along the east coast above Essex up to the estuary of 
the Forth. From these bases they drove their way inland, sometimes as in- 
dependent units, sometimes recognising a common war-lord. No confidence 
can be placed in the names attributed to the legendary leaders of the various 
bands. It is probable that even Cerdic, the 
legendary ancestor of the House of Wessex, 
is mythical. But when we have reached the 
second half of the sixth century we find a 
number of fairly distinguishable English 
states definitely in being. In the south are 
the kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, while 
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, like Kent 
itself, seem to have been occupied by Jutes. 
North of the Thames mouth lay the East 
Saxons, to the west of them the Middle 
Saxons (Middlesex) ; and we must place the 
nucleus of the West Saxon kingdom Wessex 
to the westward, upon the Thames valley, in 
preference to supposing that their advance 
was made from Hampshire or Dorsetshire. 
North as far as the Wash was East Anglia 
with the Lindiswaras (Lindsey) between the 
Wash and the Humber, and inland the 
Middle Angles and the Mercians. And north 
again from Humber to Tees was the Angle 
kingdom of Deira, and from Tees to Forth that of Bernicia. The whole of 
the west was still occupied by British principalities or, beyond the Solway, 
by Gaels, Picts, and Scots ; while between Celts and English lay the still 
debatable land which half a century before had been devastated but not 
permanently held by the English. 

By common consent of all the old authorities it was the practice of the 
English to extirpate the Britons ; that is to say, very few of them were 
spared to become slaves, though doubtless the women were not exterminated 
with such ruthlessness as the men. In the light of modern inquiry it has 
been maintained that sundry characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon social 
system point not to extermination but to the establishment of a servile 
population retained to cultivate the soil for the benefit of their Teutonic 
masters. On the other hand, it is claimed that these English institutions 
can reasonably be explained as developments having their origin in a free 
society. Moreover, the indubitable truth remains that throughout the 
English kingdoms practically every trace of the Celtic or Latin languages 
and the established Christianity disappeared altogether ; and the conquerors 




Saxon spear-heads. 



io NATION MAKING 

were influenced by them no more than Europeans have been by the 
language or religion of primitive races in Australia, Africa, and America. 
But it is a conspicuous fact that in every other portion of the Roman 
Empire, however completely overrun by Teutons, the language and religion 
of the conquered dominated those of the conquerors. Where Goths or 
Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, or Lombards ruled as masters over Latinised 
Celtic peoples the Celtic and Latin elements ultimately predominated, and 

France, Spain, and Italy have remained Latin 
nations. Outside of the British Isles, wherever 
the Teuton has amalgamated with a conquered j*ac^ 
in historic times, he has to all intents and purposes 
ceased to be a Teuton ; and it is a commonplace 
that even in Ireland the Norwegian and Norman 
conquerors became thoroughly Hibernicised, even 
as the Norsemen became Gaelicised in the Hebrides. 
In view of this it seems incredible that any large 
proportion of the conquered Britons should have 
survived among the Teutonic conquerors during the 
fifth and sixth centuries without giving them even 
a tincture of Latinity or Christianity, even though 
we must admit that the Latinising of the Britons 
had only been of a very superficial character. 

It will be seen that nothing which at all cor- 
responds to what is called the Heptarchy in England 
— a name which applies to the division of the 
country into seven substantial states — was the out- 
come of the English conquest. The varying mutations and absorptions 
of the many petty kingdoms did result in a sevenfold division in the 
course of the seventh century, at the time when Theodore of Tarsus 
organised the English episcopate ; but there was no time when England 
could be regarded as being made up definitely of seven kingdoms with 
permanently recognised boundaries. 

Even more vague was the division of the regions still held by the Celts, 
who were either already Christians at the time of the English invasion, or 
became very generally Christianised during the fifth and sixth centuries. 
After the battles of Deorham and Chester the Celts south of the Solway 
were in three separated districts — the south-western peninsula called 
Damnonia, Wales, and Cumbria, between the Mersey and the Solway. 
This last, with the northern district west of the Clyde, later formed vaguely 
the kingdom of Strathclyde. The Scots were established in Dalriada, 
which is roughly Argyle and the southern isles, and the Pictish kingdom 
covered the rest of the highlands. It is probable that the Celts between 
the wall of Hadrian and the Forth, who had never been Latinised, held 
their own against, or combined with, the Angle invaders to a much greater 
extent than to the south of the Tyne. 




Saxon arrow-heads. 



FROM C^SAR TO ALFRED n 

III 

THE RIVAL KINGDOMS 

Gildas, who wrote his book between 550 and 560, had very little know- 
ledge of the English kingdoms, though he has much to say of the anarchy pre- 
vailing among the Britons. But from about this time Bede and the writers 
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had more substantial records to deal with. 
The great King ^Ethelbert of Kent succeeded to the throne in 565, when 
Ceawlin, the first definitely historical figure in the Wessex records, was 
king of the West Saxons. Deira and Bernicia were still separate, but were 
to be united as Northumbria in 588 under ^Ethelric. The era of final 
conquest was now setting in. Ceawlin at the moment was the most powerful 
of the southern kings ; and after giving a check to ^Ethelbert of Kent and 
subjecting some of the Saxons on the north of the Thames to his sway, he 
turned his arms against the Britons, drove his way westward at the head of 
a force not so much of subjects as of confederates, and finally separated 
Damnonia from Wales by his great victory at Deorham, a few miles from 
Bath. Thenceforth Saxons and Angles occupied the whole country as far 
west as the Severn valley, though the power was already departing from 
the crown of Wessex before Ceawlin died in 593. ^thelbert of Kent 
waxed great as Wessex weakened, and the eastern kingdoms acknowledged 
his supremacy as far north as the H umber. ./Ethelfrith, King of United 
Northumbria after ^Ethelric, extended the Northumbrian dominion in the 
north, and in 613 shattered the allied forces of the Christian Celts at the 
battle of Chester, having ten years earlier utterly routed Aidan, the king 
of the Scots of Dalriada, who had gathered a large confederate army in the 
hope of crushing his rising power. 

But Christianity had already obtained a footing among the southern 
English. The Britons never attempted missionary work among the con- 
querors. The Irish, Christianised in the fifth century, spread Christianity 
among the Celts of Scotland, and the contact with them first brought Chris- 
tianity among the Angles of the north ; but it was the mission of Augustine, 
organised by Gregory the Great himself, which introduced in the south the 
Latin Christianity which, in the course of the seventh century, dominated 
all England. 

Augustine and his monks were well received by ^Ethelbert of Kent on 
their landing in 597 ; for ^Ethelbert's wife was already a Christian, being 
the daughter of one of the Merovingian kings of the Franks. The English 
seem nowhere to have had any very fervid attachment to their old paganism ; 
there was never anything in the nature of a persecution of Christians. 
Christianity spread steadily and unglorified by martyrdoms. Unfortunately 



12 NATION MAKING 

it did nothing towards reconciling the Britons and the English, because 
there were divergencies on what seem to us extremely trivial points of 
practice between the Welsh and the Latin churches, and both sides obstin- 
ately refused to make any concessions. 

As supremacy passed from Wessex when Ceawlin grew old, so it passed 
from Kent when ^Ethelbert grew old. After his death in 616 Redwald 
of East Anglia enjoyed a temporary leadership, and even overthrew the 

Northumbrian conqueror, -^thelfrith, 
four years after the battle of Chester. 
He placed on the throne of Northumbria 
Edwin, the cousin of ^thelfrith, who 
had been ousted by ^thelric from the 
throne of Deira. 

Redwald died next year, and Edwin, 
now master of Northumbria, became the 
supreme king. Edwin was converted 
to Christianity, vanquished the kings 
who ventured to resist him, and appears 
to have enforced law and order to an 
unprecedented extent throughout the 
whole of his dominion, which extended 
north to Edinburgh or Edwin's borough. 
But there was one of the sub-kings 
in the midlands, Penda of Mercia, who 
was staunch to paganism, and was 
ready to defy the Northumbrian if 
opportunity offered. The Christian 
Welsh had no scruple in allying them- 
selves with the old heathen, and Edwin 
was overthrown by Penda at the great 
battle of Heathfield. 

Penda's Welsh allies ravaged Nor- 
Saxon knives. thumbria more mercilessly than Penda 

himself. The Northumbrians, however, rallied under Oswald, a son of 
^Ethelfrith, and avenged Heathfield upon the Welsh at the battle of Hexham. 
Oswald partly recovered Edwin's supremacy over the island, but he never 
brought Penda to submission ; and he, like his predecessor, was overthrown 
by the Mercian at Maserfeld in 642. After that the effective supremacy all 
over the island belonged to Penda until his death. It is a little confusing 
to find Oswald's brother Oswy ruling in Bernicia, while an Oswin of Edwin's 
line ruled in Deira. However, at last Oswy took heart of grace, defied 
Penda, and overthrew him at the battle of Winwaed, recovered the crown of 
Deira, and again established a general Northumbrian overlordship, though 
Penda had succeeded in consolidating the central kingdom of Mercia which 
remained in permanent rivalry with Northumbria, 




FROM CiESAR TO ALFRED 13 

Penda himself was very nearly the last of the pagans, and his son 
Wulfhere was a Christian. Oswy's reign in Northumbria is especially not- 
able on account of the synod held at Whitby in 664, nine years after the 




Saxon England from the 7th to the 10th centuries. 

victory of Winwaed. Both Oswy and his predecessor Oswald had become 
Christians when they were dwelling among the Scots during the exile of 
their house. Hence Northumbrian Christianity was under the influence of 
the Celtic church. The outcome, however, of the open discussion held at 
the synod at Whitby was that Oswy resolved to conform to the Latin in 
preference to the Celtic practices ; arid this very much simplified the process, 



i 4 NATION MAKING 

carried out under the Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, of establishing the 
Latin ecclesiastical organisation under one primate all over England. The 
six principal kings of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, 
and Kent had at first a bishop apiece j. though Theodore divided each of 
the kingdoms into a larger number of dioceses, and Sussex, which had 
hitherto remained in pagan isolation, was brought into line with the rest. 
There is no sufficient ground for the tradition which attributes to Theodore 
the introduction of the ecclesiastical parish ; but it is notable that the idea 
of English unity as one church preceded and helped to prepare the way for 
the idea of English political unity, which did not really take root until the 
days of Alfred. 

Oswy had extended some sort of ascendency over the Celtic dominion 
of Strathclyde, which marched with the western border of Northumbria from 
the Forth to the Mersey. But in 685, fourteen years after his death, 
Ecgfrith of Northumbria developed a too ambitious scheme of conquering 
the Pictish kingdom beyond the Forth. There he was enticed into the 
mountains, and his army was cut to pieces at the battle of Nechtansmere, 
a blow from which Northumbria never recovered. By the opening of the 
eighth century the centre of greatest power was becoming established in 
Mercia. 

England during this century achieved a foremost place as a home of 
learning and culture. During its first half flourished the Venerable Bede, the 
most learned man of his time, historian, scholar, and saint ; and about the 
year of his death was born Alcuin, who in matters intellectual became the 
chosen counsellor of the mighty emperor whom we call Charlemagne. 
But England was not a happy realm ; because nowhere within its borders 
was to be found a dominion with a strong central government organised 
on a permanent basis. The different kingdoms were in rivalry with each 
other, besides being perpetually rent by civil broils, from the absence of 
any fixed law of succession except that which required that the king should 
be of the blood royal. There was occasionally a strong and capable king 
in one or other of the greater kingdoms whose reign is marked by the 
expansion of his own realm. 

Thus, about the beginning of the eighth century, Ine of Wessex drove 
the Celtic boundary in the southern peninsula fairly back into Devon. 
Thiy king is also celebrated for that codification of the customs of Wessex 
known as the Dooms or Laws of Ine. Mercia had remained on terms of 
what may be called mutual toleration with Northumbria, but after Ine's 
death ^Ethelbald of Mercia challenged the temporary Wessex supremacy 
in the south, and made himself supreme from the English Channel to the 
Humber. Turning to the north he tried but failed to master Northumbria, 
which was still strong enough to defend itself, though not to retaliate upon 
the southern dominion. Then Mercia itself began to fall to pieces even 
before the old king ^Ethelbald was himself assassinated ; but its power was 
restored by the great King Ofifa, who shortly afterwards seized the throne, 



FROM C/ESAR TO ALFRED 15 

and, after setting the affairs of Mercia in order, proceeded to make himself 
supreme in England. 

OfTa's reign began in 758 and lasted till 796. He drove Wessex back 
south of the line of the Thames and Severn mouth and pressed the Welsh 
back far west of the Severn, marking the new boundary between Britons 
and English by the great line of Offa's Dyke from Chester to the Bristol 
Channel. Europe recognised him as the lord of England, and he treated 
as an equal with Charles the Great, King of the Franks, who had not yet 
revived the Western Empire and assumed the Imperial crown. But 
apparently he did not care to trouble him- 
self with the subjection of Northumbria, 
which, throughout his reign, was in a state 
of miserable chaos, a term which also applies 
generally to the Pictish and Scottish dominions 
and to Strathclyde with its diverse population 
of Gaels and Britons. 

The last years of Offa saw the first attack 
upon the English shores by a new enemy, the Danes or Northmen from 
over the sea, whose appearance marks the arrival of the third stage of 
our history after the Roman evacuation. 




Penny of Offa of Mercia, A.D. 757-796. 



IV 



WESSEX AND THE DANES 



In 793 and 794 for the first time Danish longships swooped down upon 
the monastery of Lindisfarne and the monastery of Jarrow to slaughter 
and plunder. Somewhere about the same time three pirate crews landed 
in Dorsetshire and slew the reeve of the shire. But forty years passed 
before their raiding began in earnest. In the interval a strong man had 
arisen in Wessex ; and Ecgbert had wrested from Mercia the English supre- 
macy which was to femain with his house permanently, or at least with 
little intermission, until the Norman seized the sceptre. Ecgbert, who 
claimed kinship with both the royal houses of Wessex and Kent, had only 
recently returned from exile in the land of the Franks when the Witan or 
Council of Wessex called him to the throne. An efficient king, Coenwulf, 
was ruling in Mercia, and Ecgbert made no attempt to challenge his over- 
lordship. But when Coenwulf was succeeded in 822 by his brother 
Ceolwulf anarchy once more began to set in in Mercia, and the crown was 
usurped by Beornwulf. 

Still Ecgbert bided his time, nor was he himself the actual aggressor. 
It would seem that Beornwulf, who had secured the Mercian kingship, in- 
vaded Wessex when Ecgbert was engaged on a campaign in Damnonia. 
Ecgbert, returning, inflicted upon him an overwhelming defeat at Ellandune 



1 6 NATION MAKING 

in Wiltshire. Ecgbert was prompt to follow up his victory. Kent joyfully 
hailed him as overlord in place of the alien from Mercia. The king of 
Essex submitted to him, and on his death Essex was simply absorbed into 
Wessex. The same fate befell Sussex. East Anglia recovered the inde- 
pendence which it had lost to the Mercians, killed Beornwulf in battle, and 
allied itself with Ecgbert ; and in 829 Ecgbert appears to have had no 
difficulty in making himself master of Mercia. The alliance with East 
Anglia was soon converted into the subordination of that kingdom, and even 
the Northumbrian king made formal submission to Ecgbert as " Bretwalda," 
the supreme lord of the whole land — a title applied to various earlier kings 
from ^Ethelbert to Offa. 

Thus when the Danes reappeared in 834, having left the land in peace 
for forty years, Ecgbert was undisputed lord of all England, with probably 
a firmer grip of his dominion than any of his predecessors in the supre- 
macy, with the possible exception of Offa. Let us turn then to an examina- 
tion of the new invaders. 

Northmen is the term applied inclusively to the whole group which, 
at a later stage, separates into two groups of Danes and Norsemen. The 
Northmen belonged to the Scandinavian division of the Teutonic race, of 
which the Goths were the first representatives who had come into touch 
with Christendom. They occupied Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and 
parts of the southern and eastern Baltic coast. They no more formed a 
united power than the Angles and Saxons of the fifth century, to whose 
institutions their own bore a marked resemblance. Until the close of the 
eighth century they had not adopted an aggressive line ; and it is not im- 
probable that they were roused into doing so by the aggressive movement 
of the Franks under Charles the Great against the Saxon nation on the 
continent. From fighting each other, the petty chiefs turned to raiding 
the coasts of the great aggressor on the west ; and we can hardly avoid 
seeing a resemblance between meir sudden expansion as a maritime power 
and the English maritime expansion in the days of Elizabeth. They began 
to take long voyages across the open sea instead of confining themselves to 
coasting operations ; and when they did so they found they could go where 
they liked, because with their improved seamanship they developed naval 
tactics before which western fleets were powerless. 

The movement began with the Danes at the end of the eighth century ; 
and it appears to have stopped, so far as they were concerned, because 
they fell back into a condition of prolonged internal warfare, which did not 
come to an end till their comparative consolidation about 830. Hence, 
during this time they left the English and Frankish coasts alone. Mean- 
while, however, their Norwegian kinsmen followed a new direction ; and, 
passing round the north of the British Isles, harried the coasts of Scotland 
and Ireland, the latter country suffering horribly from their ravages while 
England was still enjoying immunity. But about 830 the Danes were at 
work again, and from this time Danes and Norsemen, sometimes but not 




'im*mm®msmEmg& 

The gold ring of ^Ethelwulf. 



FROM C^SAR TO ALFRED 17 

always distinguished by their victims, swept the seas, stormed along the 
coasts, and swarmed up the estuaries of Western Europe. 

The Vikings, as they were called, which probably means "warriors," were 
at first merely bands of adventurers following the banner of some famous 
warrior or high-born leader, and their object was simply plunder. Wor- 
shippers of the old gods, they had no touch of Christianity. When we 
hear of the "kings" who led them when they came, not in small companies 
but in great fleets, we must recognise that the king was simply a war-lord ; 
not the king over a territory, 
but only over the warriors 
who followed his banner. 

In 834 a fleet of the 
Northmen attacked the Rhine 
mouth, and a detachment of 
them ravaged the island of 
Sheppey. Two or three years 
later the operation was re- 
peated, and this time a de- 
tachment landed at Charmouth in Dorsetshire, where, after a stubborn 
fight with Ecgbert, they remained actually masters of the field, but had 
been too roughly handled to attempt to hold their position. In 838 they 
came to Cornwall, and, in alliance with the Cornishmen, moved upon 
Wessex, but were put to utter route by Ecgbert at Hengston Down. 

Next year Ecgbert died. His eldest son ^Ethelwulf succeeded him as 
suzerain of England and king of Wessex, a younger son, ^Ethelstan, being 
made sub-king of Essex and Kent and Sussex. During the next few years 
the Danes made perpetual invasions in force on the east coast and the 
south coast, and also on the Frankish dominion beyond the English Channel, 
passing round Finisterre, and in 848 capturing and sacking Bordeaux. 
Sometimes they were beaten off ; but usually they routed the levies brought 
against them, and only retired when they had obtained a satisfactory amount 
of plunder. By this time they were habitually working not in small detach- 
ments but in great combined fleets, numbering sometimes as many as six 
hundred vessels. In 851, however, they met with an overwhelming repulse 
at the hands of ^Ethelwulf and his son ^Ethelbald at Aclea, either Ockley 
in Surrey or Oakley near Basingstoke. Probably it was not till 855 that 
the Danes for the first time wintered in England, the first step to a Danish 
settlement; the Chronicle refers this event both to 851 and 855, but the 
defeat at Aclea makes the earlier date improbable. 

Two years later ^Ethelwulf died and was followed on the throne by 
four of his sons in succession — ^Ethelbald, who reigned till 860 ; .^Dthelbert, 
who reigned for the next six years ; yEthelred (866-871), and, finally, Alfred 
the Great. 

The Danish invasions slackened, and we only hear of them once between 
856 and 865, when they again wintered in Thanet. On this one occasion 

B 



1 8 NATION MAKING 

they met with a sharp reverse. But 865 was the opening year of a con- 
tinuous onslaught. In 866 they ravaged East Anglia, and in 867 fell on 
Northumbria, where they remained permanently and before long were 
indisputable masters of the country. In 868 they struck into Mercia, 
though they made terms and retired again ; and in 870 they overwhelmed 
East Anglia and killed its last king, St. Edmund. Then in 871 opened the 
great attack upon Wessex, led by two kings, Halfdan and Bagsceg, and five 
jarls or nobles. Against them marched ^Ethelred and his younger brother 
Alfred. The spring and summer witnessed a series of desperate battles, 
Danes and Saxons alternately getting the better in combats which were 
indecisive. Even the great Saxon victory of Ashdown only meant that the 
Danes were forced back into their fortified camp at Reading, whence, in 
spite of the fact that one of the kings and all the five jarls had been slain, 
they were strong enough to issue again a fortnight later and defeat iEthelred 
at Basing. This success was repeated two months later, and was followed 
immediately by the death of ^Ethelred and the election by the Witan of 
Alfred in preference to the very youthful son of the dead king. 



V 

ALFRED THE GREAT 

Heavy Danish reinforcements had come up either before or after the battle 
of Basing, and the king was defeated in his first engagement with them at 
Wilton. Both sides must have suffered tremendous losses during this " year 
of battles," and Alfred was reduced to buying a short respite — a dangerous 
policy but one at the moment inevitable. For the next four years the 
Danes devoted their attention to Mercia and Northumbria. The latter 
was completely subjugated by the Northmen, and thenceforward North- 
umbria was as much Danish or Norse as Anglian ; for although the Danes 
did not exterminate they took possession of as much of the land as they 
chose, though they do not appear to have settled to any extent in the 
old Bernicia. 

But half the Danes left Northumbria to the other half and for the 
time being dominated East Anglia and Mercia ; and these, recruited by 
fresh Viking bands, again in 876 turned to the invasion of Wessex. 

Meanwhile Alfred had been making use of the time allowed him. 
He had started the nucleus of a navy which should be able to challenge 
the invaders on the element which they regarded as their own ; and we 
may presume that he had also been reorganising the military forces of 
Wessex after the destructive struggle of 871. When the Danes struck 
they struck hard, suddenly, and without warning, burst across Wessex, and 
seized and fortified a strong position on the Dorsetshire coast, where they 
could be joined by their kinsmen from Ireland. Alfred, however, blockaded 



FROM CiESAR TO ALFRED 



l 9 



Ecgiert, 802. 



sEthelwulf. 



^Ethelstan, 
sub-king of Essex. 



JEthelbald, 858. 



sEthelbert, 860. 



sEthelred, 866. 

I 

/Ethelwald. 



Alfred, 871. 



Edward 

the Elder, 

901. 



^Ethelflaed, 
Lady of Mercia. 



jElflaed ,vz. Bald- 
win II. of Flanders, 
ancestor of Matilda, 

wife of William I. 



them on the land side with a force which they did not choose to engage. 
The Danes agreed to accept what may be called a ransom as before, but 
did not keep faith ; a large force, being well mounted, broke through the 
English lines by night and hurried to Exeter, where they fortified them- 
selves. Alfred could carry neither of the Danish posts, nor could he 
concentrate before one of them, since that would have left Wessex to be 
devastated by the other. 

In the spring, however, the Vikings in Dorset took to the sea, meaning to 
join the force at Exeter; 

but the fleet was for- THE FAMILY OF ALFRED THE GREAT 

tunately annihilated by 
a storm. Hence the 
army at Exeter, a suf- 
ficiently formidable 
force in itself, offered 
after some delay to re- 
tire, and was permitted 
to do so without relucr 
tance. However they 
only withdrew into 
Mercia, where they had 

allowed an English ealdorman to enjoy the title of a sub-king. They now 
deprived him of half his territory, as much, that is, as lay beyond Watling- 
street, the great road running from London to Chester ; and just as the army 
had before divided, one half remaining in Northumbria and settling it, while 
the other half abode in the south and prepared for further conquest, so now 
a considerable proportion of the army seems to have turned to the business 
of settlement ; while the balance, led by Guthrum, prepared to renew the 
war in Wessex in conjunction with a force from over the Irish Sea. 

Again the move was made suddenly and without warning, this time in 
the dead of winter, when no one was dreaming of military movements. 
So effective was it that Alfred himself had to take refuge in the marsh- 
surrounded isle of Athelney ; and it was some months before he could 
concentrate a force which could again take the field against the main Danish 
army. A desperate battle followed at Ethandune or Edington, when Alfred's 
victory was decisive. Guthrum made terms, and this time the terms were 
honourably kept. He himself embraced Christianity with many of his 
followers, and withdrew all claim to that part of Mercia south-west of 
Watling-street ; and it was agreed that the Danes should remain undisturbed 
in the settled district beyond, henceforth known as the Danelagh. This was 
the Peace of Chippenham or Wedmore, 878, which left Alfred free to 
organise his kingdom. The agreement, with some modification, was con- 
firmed some years later in 886, when the Danes had broken out in spite of 
their pledges and Alfred had struck some hard blows in return, including 
the capture of London and its transference to Wessex. 



20 NATION MAKING 

Still Alfred had not yet done with the Danes. It must be borne in 
mind that ever since the middle of the century the Danish forces in England 
had merely formed a portion of the organised host of Northmen, who had 
ceased to be mere desultory raiders and had set out upon a career of 
conquest on the south no less than on the north of the Channel. Alfred's 
arrangements with Guthrum effected a settlement only as far as concerned 
the Danes in England. But the great army met with a severe check on 
the continent at the hand of the Emperor Arnulf, and, as a consequence, 
it again turned its attention to England in 892, in conjunction with the 
great Viking Hasting. By this time, however, Alfred's organisation of 
Wessex had been completed. The Danes of the Danelagh gave not much 
active help to their kinsfolk beyond providing them a friendly reception in 
their own territory. Alfred's newly created fleet proved a satisfactory 
match for its opponents, and most of the hard fighting was done in Mercia. 
In fact, the Danish host now found that the king of Wessex was not 




Drinking and Minstrelsy among the Saxons. 



fighting desperately at bay, but was consistently the victor. At any rate 
they were fairly beaten out of Alfred's own dominion, and either went home 
or joined their kinsmen in the Danelagh. 

In the last year of the century, 900, King Alfred died ; but his work was 
accomplished. He had saved Wessex from the Danes, and the saving of 
Wessex was the saving of England. No monarch has left a name more 
glorious ; perhaps he is the only triumphant ruler of whom no man has 
ever ventured to speak a word in dispraise. 

Whatsoever can be accounted the work of a king — as a leader in battle, 
as an organiser of victory, as an administrator, a legislator, a judge, as a 
teacher, as an exemplar, in a word as the father of his people — that work 
was done by Alfred in the face of tremendous difficulties, including personal 
ill-health, with unsurpassed wisdom and skill. He was happy in successors, 
who were well fitted to complete what he perforce left unfinished. He 
supplied the world with a new type, because the pre-eminence of his virtue 
was only the counterpart of the pre-eminence of his genius. No other man 
perhaps has been at once so good and so great. An admirable captain in 
the field, he organised the military system and the military methods of the 



FROM C^SAR TO ALFRED 21 

Saxons, making possible the triumphs of his children and his children's 
children. He created a navy, the only one which successfully challenged 
the sea-rovers on their own element. His codification of the Law gave it 
a permanent shape. He inspired every man who worked under him with 
his own enthusiasm for justice and mercy. He made his court the centre 
of the intellectual light, of the best culture and learning of the day, in order 
that it might irradiate his people. Charlemagne himself was not a more 
zealous educator. Never, perhaps, have there been combined in one man 
such lofty idealism and such practical common-sense. The English nation 
has habitually refrained from fastening complimentary titles upon its 
monarchs ; but it has rightly made him the one exception, and claimed for 
him the name of the Great. 

Before passing on to the next stage, it will be well to give brief attention 
to the North, where the Danes appear not to have settled in Bernicia — at 
least north of the Tyne in the district which came to be known as Lothian ; 
but the Norsemen constantly threatened to make permanent settlements on 
the west — in Cumbria and the Isles — and there to establish a Norwegian 
kingdom. Of the Celtic North we have seen that there were three main 
divisions — Pictland, Dalriada or Scot-land, and Strathclyde. Matters so 
fell out that about the middle of the ninth century the heir to the kingdom 
of the Scots was also, by the Pictish law of succession through the female, 
heir to the kingdom of the Picts. Thus very much as some seven and a 
half centuries later the crowns of England and Scotland were united not 
by conquest, but by the recognised laws of succession, so at this time were 
the kingdoms of the Scots and Picts permanently united. As a natural 
consequence the king, Kenneth M 'Alpine, a Scot on his father's side, was 
regarded as a Scot by the world at large, and he and his successors were 
known as kings of Scotland. It was not, however, till some time later 
that the Strathclyde kingdom came under the same dominion. 



CHAPTER II 

KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 

I 

ALFRED'S SUCCESSORS 

WHEN King Alfred died England south of the Tyne was divided into two 
parts, the line passing diagonally from Chester to the Thames estuary below 
London. Alfred's treaty with the Danes had simply recognised the facts. 
Where the Danes were already masters they were allowed to remain 
masters ; the king had better work to do in organising his half of the 
country than in embarking upon an impracticable attempt to reconquer 
the Danelagh. For it must be borne in mind that the north and east 
had never owned the overlordship of Wessex till forty years before Alfred's 
accession. In East Anglia the Saxon dynasty had no stronghold, and the 
last sub-king, St. Edmund, had apparently been chosen by the men of East 
Anglia from the old line, not appointed by the king of Wessex from 
Ecgbert's line. The Angles might not love the Danes, but after all the 
Danes were little more alien than the Wessex folk. Finally, if there was 
any sort of submission of the Danelagh to Alfred's sovereignty it was of 
a merely formal character. The " Frith " or agreement with Guthrum 
manifestly aimed at discouraging intercourse between the Saxon kingdom 
and the Danelagh, probably because such intercourse was regarded as more 
likely to bring about hostilities than to increase amity. 

Alfred's own kingdom included a large part of Meicia and was under 
the government of an ealdorman, ^Ethelred, who may have belonged to the 
house of Offa, and who had to wife Alfred's very remarkable daughter 
^Ethelflaed, who, after her husband's death, was known as the Lady of 
Mercia. Alfred's successor on the throne of Wessex was Edward, called the 
Elder. The relations between Wessex and the Danelagh wejpe doomed not 
to be permanent, for it was always a difficult matter to keep the Danes 
from aggressive movement. Hence the reign of Edward was largely taken 
up with the establishment of a real supremacy over the greater part of the 
Danelagh, a policy which was practically forced upon the Saxon king and 
was carried out with great efficiency by the energetic co-operation of the 
Lady of Mercia, who, like Edward himself, must have inherited her father's 
military talents and his capacity for inspiring enthusiastic devotion. The 
great feature of the campaigning was the appropriation of the system 



WESSEX KINGS OF ENGLAND 

Alfred, 871. 

Edtvard the Elder, 901. 

I 

I I I 

sEthelstan, 924. Edmund, 943. Eadred, 947. 



Edwy, 955. 



Edward the Martyr, 
975- 



Edmund Ironside, 
1016. 



Edgar the Peaceful, 
959- 



.-Ethelred the Redeless, 
979- 

I 

I 
Edward the Confessor, 
1042. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 23 

borrowed from the Danes themselves — of establishing fortified posts or burhs 
either at strategic points or where villages had already begun to develop 
into important towns. 

The conquest, however, did not mean the expulsion of the Danes, but 
little more than their effective acceptance of the supremacy of the Saxon 
king. Mercia, like Wessex, was parcelled out into shires ; but beyond 
Watling-street the shire was the district appertaining to a Danish military 
centre such as Leicester or Derby ; and it would appear that south of 
Watling-street the shire was the district 
appertaining to one of ^Ethelflaed's 
boroughs. There was no longer an 
" ealdorman of Mercia " ; but the shires 
did not get an ealdorman apiece ; and 
in the Danelagh the name of earl re- 
placed thatof ealdorman, the earl being 
apparently in most cases a Danish jarl. 
About the 3^ear 921, when ^Ethel- 
flaed died, the absorption of Mercia 
and East Anglia was completed ; and 
before Edward's death, probably in 
924, the kings of Wales and of the 
North had " taken him to father and 
lord " ; among them Constantine, the grandson of Kenneth M' Alpine, king 
of the Scots and Picts. This so-called submission was put forward as the 
starting-point of the claim to the suzerainty of Scotland made some centuries 
later by Edward I. of England. There is no really adequate ground for 
doubting that it actually took place, though the technical sufficiency of the 
evidence can fairly be challenged, since the only real authority for it, the 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, attributes the event to the year 924, and makes 
Ragnold of Northumbria a party to it, whereas Ragnold died in 921 
according to other authorities. However the chances are that the chronicler 
was guilty only of some inaccuracy of detail ; but Professor Freeman's 
view that from this time forward the sovereignty of the kings of England 
over Scotland was " an essential part of the public law of Britain " cannot 
hold water. There was no more permanence in such a submission, if sub- 
mission it can be called, than in the submission of Wessex to Offa of 
Mercia. Public law was not crystallised, and no one at the time would 
have dreamed of supposing that Scotland had placed itself permanently 
under the supremacy of England. 

Edward was succeeded in 924 by yEthehtan, another great ruler and 
soldier. ■ In his day the North sought to throw off its allegiance; and the 
Norsemen from Ireland, under a leader named Anlaf or Olaf, joined with the 
king of Scots and the people of Strathclyde to challenge the monarch who 
claimed to be king of all Britain. The forces of the allies were put to utter 
rout in the great fight at Brunanburh, which is probably to be placed some- 



24 NATION MAKING 

where to the north of the Solway. The battle is commemorated in a fine 
Saxon war-song — 

Clave through the shield- wall the brood of King Edward, 

Hewed the war-linden with blades hammer-wrought ; 

Low lay the foe there, the Scots folk, the ship-folk, 

Death doomed they fell. 

Thick lay the heroes there scattered by javelines 

O'er the shield smitten, the men of the North, 

Folk too of Scotland weary, war-sated. 

Forth the West Saxons in warrior bands 

The live-long day 

Followed the feet of the folk of the foemen ; 

Hewed they the flying folk, thrust through their backs amain; 

Sharp were their swords. 

Hard was the hand-play the Mercians refused not 

To one of the warriors wending with Anlaf. 

iEthelstan's victory was complete, and his supremacy was not again 
challenged. Meagre as are the chroniclers, we can see how mighty a king 
he was in the eyes of contemporaries. One of his sisters married the 
king of the West Franks; another married Hugh the Great, the father 
of Hugh Capet, whose dynasty displaced that of the descendants of 
Charlemagne. Another was the wife of Otto the Great, the restorer of the 
Holy Roman Empire, and two more were wedded to kings. It may be 
remarked in parenthesis that a sister of Edward the Elder and of the Lady 
of Mercia was the wife of Baldwin II. of Flanders and the ancestress of 
Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror. 

yEthelstan's successor was his very much younger half-brother Edmund, 
called the " Deed-doer," who, boy though he was, had shared the glories of 
Brunanburh. But his life, ended by the dagger of an assassin, was too 
short to enable him to fulfil its promise. In his brief reign a northern 
insurrection necessitated the infliction of a sharp chastisement ; and it is 
recorded that he gave a portion of Strathclyde to Malcolm, King of Scots, 
"on condition that he should be his fellow-worker both on sea and on 
land," which looks much more like an alliance than a submission on the 
part of the Scottish king. It is exceedingly probable that about this time 
the Norsemen from the West (not the Danes of the Danelagh) had made 
themselves masters of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which are crowded 
with place-names of Norse not Danish origin, and that this Scottish alliance 
was made in order to check the danger from the Norsemen. 

Edmund himself was not five and twenty when he was assassinated ; 
and his two small boys Edwy and Edgar were passed by in favour of the 
last of the sons of Edward the Elder, Eadred, who displayed the family 
capacity and vigour, and at last succeeded in bringing the turbulent Danes 
of Northumbria to submission. But his reign was little longer than his 
brother's ; and on his death Edwy, though only fifteen, was not a second 
time passed over. Edwy's story is obscure. The young king chose to 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 25 

marry his cousin, a girl named ^Elfgifu, he having fallen into the toils of 
her ambitious mother iEthelgifu, though the pair were not wedded till 
some time after Edwy's accession. Ugly stories were canvassed about the 
dame's influence on the boy, who kicked against the decent control of the 
counsellors, lay and clerical, in whom his uncles had trusted ; as a boy 
very well might do who had fallen under the influence of a foolish and 
designing woman. Edwy played the prodigal, while his mother-in-law 
struck vindictively at her enemies. The result was that Northumbria was 
in a very short time in revolt, and elected the younger brother Edgar king. 




A group of Saxon soldiers about A.D. iooo. 

Edwy had to give way and submit to a division of the kingdom which 
allowed him to reign in Wessex. But five years after his accession he was 
dead and Edgar was lord of all England. 

Both Edmund and Eadred had reposed much confidence in Dunstan, 
Abbot of Glastonbury, who was prominent among those who had set them- 
selves against ^Ethelgifu. The chroniclers are all on the side of the clerics, 
and it is likely enough that the other party have not received fair play at their 
hands. But there is no warrant for assuming that their tale was a mere 
partisan clerical invention. The outcome of the whole disastrous business 
was that Dunstan, who had been exiled by Edwy, became Edgar's principal 
counsellor, and probably the real ruler of the kingdom. In 960 he became 



26 NATION MAKING 

Archbishop of Canterbury, and was primate and first minister for eighteen 
years. 

Edgar himself ruled till 975, and his reign was a period of consistent 
prosperity ; he had no opportunities for displaying his capacities as a warrior. 
The most interesting traditions concerning him personally are that of his 
state procession on the river Dee, when his barge was rowed by eight vassal 
kings, and that which ascribes to him the creation of a great fleet of six 
hundred and forty sail which annually patrolled the seas from corner to 

corner of the island. 
The chroniclers con- 
cerned themselvesrather 
with the ecclesiastical 
activities of Dunstan, 
who was an energetic 
reformer, and set him- 
self to improving the 
morals of the clergy on 
the approved lines of 
enforcing celibacy and 
the general rigour of 
monastic discipline. 
Though Edgar hadruled 
all England for sixteen 
years he was but thirty 
when he died in 975. 
In spite of sundry im- 
putations against his 
morals the quiet which prevailed throughout his reign bears witness to 
his capacity ; for those were not days in which a feeble monarch had much 
chance of peace ; even his exceedingly capable uncles and father had had 
to fight hard to enforce their dominion. 

No sooner was Edgar dead than troubles began. He was succeeded by 
Edward, his son by his first wife, a boy of thirteen ; but he left also ^Ethel- 
red, a boy of seven, the son of his second wife -fElfthryth, who also survived 
him and was determined to place her boy on the throne. Within three years 
the young king was murdered by the retainers of ^Elfthryth. In those three 
years dissension and disorganisation among the magnates had reached 
such a pitch that no attempt was made to avenge Edward's death, and his 
half-brother was immediately crowned, though miraculous properties were 
attributed to the body of the murdered king, who became known to posterity 
as Edward the Martyr. 

Little enough cause had ^Ethelred to thank his mother for the crime 
which placed him on the throne and secured to the man " evil of counsel," the 
" Redeless," the " Unready," the execration of his contemporaries and the 
contempt of posterity. But it was not until he was grown up that the 




Edgar making an offering. 
[From a charter granted by the king in 966.] 




ST. DUNSTAN, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 
From a twelfth century MS. in the British Museum. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 27 

unhappy king proved himself the evil genius of his country. While he was 
a boy there was still a decent semblance of government ; but when he was 
old enough to choose his own advisers he always collected the worst avail- 
able. Of Alfred a hundred years before it has been said that every word 
and every act of his seems to have been about the best that could have been 
said or done at the time. ^Ethelred invariably did the worst things that 
he could do. When the time demanded action he was passive ; but if an 
opportunity occurred for being destructively active he never missed it. Quern 
deus vult perdere, prius dementat; it is as though ^Ethelred had been stricken 
with mental and moral blindness as the penalty for the crime which placed 
him on the throne. For eight and thirty years he was more or less king of 
England, and most of those years are a sort of nightmare. 

For after leaving England in peace for more than three-quarters of a 
century the Danes from overseas again began to trouble the land. Vikings 
who had attempted to harry England since the days of the Great Alfred had 
invariably received such severe lessons that they were in no haste to repeat 
their experiments. Now in 980 and the two following years raiders ap- 
peared on the coasts. Encouraged by success, they came again in 988. 
These appear, indeed, to have been merely movements as much Norse as 
Danish, emanating from Ireland. But enough had been done to make it 
known among the rovers that organised attack would no longer be met by 
organised national defence. In the first four years of the last decade of the 
century the coasts jvere repeatedly ravaged by the great Viking Olaf Trygg- 
vesen, who was subsequently converted to Christianity and became king 
of Norway. When the Norsemen landed they found no one to face them 
but the militia or fyrd of the shire where they happened to make their 
descent, hastily summoned together, who fought against them now and 
again stoutly enough. ^Ethelred had already begun the disastrous practice 
of buying the raiders off, when Olaf found an ally in Sweyn, the son of 
Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark. Their onslaught in 994 produced the 
second great payment of ransom ; and although there was now a brief 
interval, the story from 997 onwards is practically a record of perpetual 
invasions and occasional ransoms, each one larger than the last, diversified 
here and there by a stubborn fight and more frequently by ignominious 
disasters, brought about, according to the chronicler, by the flagrant treachery 
of one or another of ^Ethelred's favourites, among whom looms portentous 
the arch-traitor, Eadric Streona. 

Perhaps of all ^Ethelred's performances the most outrageous was the 
massacre of the Danes upon St. Brice's Day in the year 1002. It is 
certainly impossible to accept the traditional assertion that a literal massacre 
of all the Danes in the kingdom was carried out by the orders of the king, 
but something of the kind certainly occurred in Wessex. The Danes in the 
Danelagh seem to have played their part quite as energetically as their neigh- 
bours in fighting the raiders. But the practical effect was to bring down 
Sweyn himself, now king of Denmark and of Norway as well, with the 



28 NATION MAKING 

whole Danish host. Still it was not till some years later that Sweyn seems 
to have made up his mind to eject or slay yEthelred and make himself king 
of England. 

Meanwhile ^thelred's incompetence had been made more manifest 
than ever; for though the extortion of a huge ransom in 1007 made him 
turn desperately to an attempt more or less successful to construct a large 
fleet, the fleet, when built, was so hopelessly mismanaged that it served 
no useful purpose whatever. At last in 1013, when Sweyn again came into 
the H umber with a mighty host, the Danes of the Danelagh made up their 
minds to offer him the crown of England. Sweyn marched through the 
country, iEthelred fled across the seas, and Sweyn was acknowedged king. 
But a few days later the Dane died suddenly, leaving his son Knut, 
popularly known as Canute, to claim the succession. 

Then for a brief moment appeared on the scene a national hero, 




An Anglo-Saxon bed and its appurtenances (about A.D. IOOO). 
[ From ^Elfric's paraphrase of Genesis. ] 

Edmund Ironside, ^Ethelred's son, a prince who seemed fitted to revive the 
older glories of his house. While the young Knut was making ready to 
enforce his claim, ^Ethelred returned, showing no sign of any intention of 
changing his old evil courses. Where ^thelred's direct influence could 
be felt Edmund could do nothing ; but the North was ready to follow a 
bold leader, having before yielded in sheer despair over ^Ethelred's incom- 
petence. The South was helpless, ^thelred's death in 10 16 came too 
late. Edmund made a splendid stand against Knut ; but sheer treachery 
brought about his defeat at the battle of Assandun. Even then Knut 
realised that with such an antagonist victory was by no means certain, 
and a treaty was made dividing the kingdom on the old lines of the treaty of 
Wedmore, though the southern portion of the Danelagh went to Edmund's 
share. But the heroic prince was not destined to be a second Alfred. 
The treaty had hardly been concluded when he died, being then but 
five and twenty, while his rival was only twenty-one. It was perhaps 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 



29 



inevitable that Edmund's death should have been attributed to foul play 
on the part of Knut, who succeeded to the entire kingdom without 
opposition. 



II 



FROM KNUT TO THE CONQUEST 

At the moment when Knut made himself king of England his character 
appeared to be that of a bloodthirsty and treacherous tyrant. His Christi- 
anity was exceedingly fresh, since his father, Sweyn, had been savagely 
hostile to a faith of which he had 
some superstitious dread. But once 
on the throne the young king curbed 
his barbaric instincts ; only once in 
his later years did he allow anger to 
lead him to a foul crime, the sacri- 
legious murder of his cousin, Jarl 
IJlf. We may be in doubt how far 
his merits were due to policy and 
how far to a regenerate spirit, but 
their effect was entirely beneficial 
to England. 

At the first Knut found an excuse 
for killing Edwy, the full brother 
of Edmund Ironside. He did not 
venture on the murder of Edmund's 
children whom he sent out of the 
country to Olaf, King of Sweden, 
who in turn passed the boys on to 
Stephen of Hungary, who brought 
them up. One of them became 
the father of Edgar the Atheling, of whom we shall hear again. Next, 
Knut married Emma of Normandy, the second wife and now the widow 
of ^Ethelred, although, she was several years older than he. Possibly she 
may have learnt to detest ^Ethelred so thoroughly that she was willing 
to have the two sons she had borne to him overlooked ; at any rate she 
left them to be bred up in Normandy, and accepted the hand of the 
Danish king of England on condition that if she had a son by him that 
son should be his heir. Knut had not succeeded to the Danish throne, 
as he had an elder brother, Harald ; but Harald's early death made him 
king of Denmark as well as of England; and in the course of his reign 
he also recovered Norway, which his father had won from Olaf Tryggveson, 
but which had broken away from Harald, and was ruled by another not 
less famous Olaf "the Thick," a stout warrior and energetic Christian, who 




Knut and Emma, his Queen. 
[From Knut's Book of Grants.] 



3 o NATION MAKING 

was ultimately canonised. Thus Knut was in his day the lord of a 
Scandinavian empire — the first king of England with a great continental 
dominion, though there were many after him. But, as happened often 
enough in early days, the empire depended upon the man who had made it, 
and broke up as soon as he himself was gone. 

But Knut the politic meant England to be the basis of his empire ; and 
he resolved to depend not on a tributary state but on a loyal nation. 
Therefore after he had once made the weight of his hand and the firmness 
of his seat to be thoroughly felt, he set himself to the good governance of 
his realm. The traitors who had sought to curry favour with him by false 
dealing with Edmund met the stern doom they deserved. The king levied 
a tremendous ransom from the country in his first year ; but he used it to 
pay off the Danish host and sent it home, retaining only forty ships, whose 
crews provided his own huscarles or bodyguard. Nor did he rob his 
English subjects to provide land for his Danish followers, though for a 
very few of them he found sufficient provision in the forfeited estates of 
the traitors. As, in later days, Norman kings pledged themselves to observe 
the "good laws of King Edward the Confessor," so Knut pledged himself to 
observe the good laws of King Edgar. But perhaps the most important 
change which he introduced was the principle of dividing the country into 
great earldoms, provinces much larger than the old ealdormanships. 
Although the smaller earldoms were not abolished, the four or five great 
earls were magnates with much more power than had even been possessed 
by single ealdorman. Especially notable among the new earls was Godwin, 
a Saxon* of apparently obscure lineage, whom Knut wedded to a kins- 
woman of his own, and to whom he presently transferred the earldom' of 
Wessex, which at first he had retained in his own hands. 

Knut is the subject of much picturesque anecdote which is too familiar 
for repetition here. His rule was strong, firm, and just, and the country 
prospered ; but the events of most lasting importance connected with it 
belong also to the history of Scotland. 

The Scots king, Kenneth, together with his kinsman, the king of Strath- 
clyde, was in that crew of kings who rowed King Edgar on the Dee ; but 
his successor, Malcolm II., recognised no allegiance to ^Ethelred the Redeless. 
In one great raid upon Bernicia he had been beaten off with heavy loss, in 
1006 ; but one of Knut's early misdeeds was the slaying of Earl Uhtred of 
Northumbria, who had been the victor in that battle. In 1018 Malcolm 
again came down on Bernicia and won an overwhelming victory at Carham, 
the result of which was that Uhtred's brother Eadwulf ceded to him all 
Lothian ; that is to say, Bernicia between the Tweed and the Forth ; and 
from this time the Tweed formed the Scottish border. That fact was not 
altered by a northern expedition of Knut's, on which occasion Malcolm 
declined to fight and made submission, but retained Lothian. The sub- 
mission, of course, counted precisely as long as a king of England was able 
to enforce it. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 31 

When Knut died in 1035, being even then not more than forty years 
of age, his empire went to pieces. Harthacnut, his son by Emma, became 
king of Denmark ; two illegitimate sons, Sweyn and Harold, called Hare- 
foot, whose mother was an English woman, became kings of Norway and 
England respectively, though Harold's claim was disputed by Earl Godwin 
in favour of Harthacnut. Alfred, the younger son of Emma and ^thelred, 
came from Normandy to Wessex, which had just professed allegiance to 
Harthacnut ; but there he was treacherously seized and blinded and 
shortly afterwards died, almost cer- 
tainly with the connivance of Earl 
Godwin. But Harthacnut was too 
much engaged in a vain attempt to 
dispute Sweyn's position in Norway 
to assert his title in England ; and 
Wessex presently recognised Harold. 

Harold, of whom the chroniclers 
have nothing good to relate, died in 
1040, and Harthacnut, after some 
negotiation, was accepted as king of 
England. But he lived to do evil for 
something less than two years. His 
half-brother Edward, the only surviv- 
ing son of ^thelred and Emma, was 
elected king immediately upon the 
death of Harthacnut, while Denmark 
passed to the nephews of Knut. 

Edward had spent nearly the whole 
of his life in Normandy, and he loved 
all things Norman. Also he was a 
religious devotee. The pious endow- 
ment of the Church supplied his 
principal conception of the duties of 
kingship, the things of the world and 
of the flesh being all contemptible. 
Norman parasites, lay, and ecclesiastical, on whom he bestowed honours 
and benefices with a lavish hand. The government of the country fell 
mainly to the three great earls, Godwin of Wessex, Leofric of Mercia, 
and the Danish Siward of Northumbria, who, in the North, stood com- 
paratively remote from the intrigues and rivalries of the South. Of the 
three, Godwin, the former ally of the king's mother, had from the outset 
the most influence with the king himself, whom he persuaded to marry his 
daughter Edith, or, more correctly, Ealdgyth ; who accepted the situation, 
although the marriage was merely nominal, the king having taken a vow 
of chastity. Also he obtained considerable though minor earldoms for 
his two eldest sons Sweyn and Harold. Had Harold been Godwin's 



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His court became the home of 



32 NATION MAKING 

only son the great earl would probably soon have ruled unchallenged ; 
but Sweyn and the third son Tostig were lawless ruffians, and Godwin 
would not cut them adrift. Sweyn got himself deservedly outlawed for 
carrying off the fair abbess of the nunnery at Leominster. He was 
apparently on the point of being recalled when he murdered Earl 
Beorn, who had opposed his inlawing ; to the intense disgust of Earl 
Harold. Even then Godwin was weak enough to sue for and obtain his 
eldest son's pardon. But his influence broke down over an ecclesiastical 

quarrel with the king, when 
THE LATER LINE OF ALFRED the earl persuaded the chapter 

Mtheired the Redeiess. of Canterbury to elect a kins- 

Married man of his own to the Arch- 

il) j£^Z (^Emma of Normandy. bishopric Without Consulting 

I . I the king, who had chosen for 

Edmund Ironside. I 5^ 

1 _J that office the Norman Robert 

Edmund. Edward. Edward the Confessor. Alfred. J ° ' 

J While the quarrel was in 

Edgar the ^Etheling. Margaret, m. progress Eustace, Count of 

Malcolm Canmore. Boulogne, the king's brother- 

I I in-law, came to Dover on his 

Line of Scots Kings. EdUh.^r Matilda, way to visit Edward. A brawl 

broke out between the count's 
retinue and the Dover folk, with the result that after some sharp fight- 
ing the count and his party were ejected, Eustace appealed to Edward, 
who promptly ordered Godwin to inflict condign punishment on the people 
of Dover. Edward's predilection for foreigners was bitterly resented, 
and Godwin refused flatly. Practically he defied the king, but he soon 
found that defiance was premature ; that the North was against him, and 
even Wessex was half-hearted. The result was that he and his sons, who 
had been prepared to stand by their father at all costs, took to flight to 
Flanders or Ireland and were outlawed. 

It was soon evident that the fall of Godwin in 1051 meant the triumph 
of the king's foreign favourites, though Harold's earldom was given to 
wfElfgar, son of Leofric. It was at this time that the young Duke William 
of Normandy visited England and, according to his own statement, was 
promised the succession by King Edward. But Godwin's eclipse was only 
temporary. In 1052 he and his sons returned to the coast of Wessex and 
found the country disposed to rise in their support. The king would not 
fight, though he might have done so ; and while negotiations were pending 
there was a rapid and somewhat ignominious exodus of the aliens. 

It was no part of Godwin's policy to press his advantage unduly. His 
pose was that of the true patriot ; and he made no attempt to injure his 
rivals. He did not even seek once more to restore Sweyn, who never re- 
turned to England. But from this time forth Godwin himself, and after him 
his son Harold, held supreme influence with the king. In fact Godwin sur- 




Seal of Edward the Confessor. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 33 

vived his success only a few months. For thirteen years Harold was the 
king's chief minister, making it his aim to avoid friction with the two great 
houses of Leofric and Siward. On succeeding to the earldom of Wessexhe 
allowed ^Elfgar to be reinstated in his own previous earldom of East Anglia, 
which had been transferred to Leofric's son during the eclipse of the house 
of Godwin. 

These years are of special interest in Scotland, because it was about this 
time that Malcolm Canmore, the son of King Duncan, recovered the Scottish 
throne by overthrowing Macbeth. All the 
kings of Scotland since Malcolm himself 
and all the kings of England since the 
accession of Henry II. descend from 
Malcolm and his English wife Margaret, 
the grandchild of Edmund Ironside. The 
historical facts do not bear much resem- 
blance to the story which Shakespeare ex- 
tracted from Holinshed. King Malcolm II., 
the victor of Carham, was a vigorous ruler, 
who was resolved that his grandson Duncan, 
who had already succeeded to the kingdom 
of Strathclyde, should succeed him also on 
the Scottish throne in accordance with the 
custom of most civilised nations ; whereas, 
according to the Pictish custom, Duncan was outside the Scottish succes- 
sion, and the heir of the Scottish throne was the infant son not of Macbeth 
himself, but of his wife Gruach, who was a widow when he married her. 
In the interests of the infant, Macbeth challenged Duncan's succession, 
killed him, very possibly in fair fight, and then held the throne nominally 
on behalf of his step-child. Duncan himself was but a young man ; his 
infant children, Malcolm and Donalbain, were carried out of the kingdom 
and placed in charge of Earl Siward of Northumbria, whose daughter 
had been Duncan's queen. Malcolm abode with his grandfather for 
fourteen years ; and then in 1054 Siward and his sons marched into 
Scotland with the youth to overthrow Macbeth, who was defeated but not 
overthrown at the battle of Dunsinane. It was not till three years later 
that Malcolm succeeded in killing him at the battle of Lumphanan. 

If we reckon old Siward the Dane as an Englishman we may say that 
Malcolm was half Celt and half English ; in fact he was half Celt and half 
Dane, for Siward was pure Dane. But Malcolm, owing to his training, was 
more a Northumbrian than a Scot ; he married a princess of the house of 
Wessex ; and, consequently, hereafter we find Scottish Northumbria or 
Lothian becoming the real seat of power of the house of Malcolm, while 
the Anglo-Danish element in the northern kingdom is politically pre- 
dominant. But Malcolm himself left to posterity a nickname which was not 
Saxon but Gaelic, Ceanmohr, corrupted into Canmore, " Big-head." 

c 




34 NATION MAKING 

Siward's death a year after the battle of Dunsinane wrought trouble 
in England, for King Edward made Harold's brother Tostig Earl of 
Northumbria instead of Waltheof, the son of Siward's old age. It is 
fairly obvious that Harold himself was always anxious to effect a reconcilia- 
tion between his own house and that of Leofric of Mercia, but there was 
no love lost between the two families ; and .^Elfgar, Earl of East Anglia, 
Leofric's son, opposed the bestowal of Northumbria on Tostig. For no 
adequate reason assigned, he was outlawed immediately afterwards, though 

no attack was made on Leofric him- 
self, whose wife was the famous Lady 
Godiva. ^Elfgar went off to Ireland, 
whence he started to play the Viking, 
and then joined forces with King 
Griffith of North Wales ; and together 
they proceeded to harry the marches. 
Harold had to hurry to the West, 
where he offered peace and pardon 
to ^Elfgar ; the offer was accepted, 
so there was once more peace be- 
tween the houses of Leofric and 
Godwin. After that Harold and 
Leofric between them brought King 
Griffith to submission, and made him 
take an oath of loyalty as Edward's 
vassal, which had the usual value. Next year Leofric died, and ^Ifgar 
succeeded to the Mercian earldom, while East Anglia with a portion of 
Wessex, surrendered by Harold himself, provided earldoms for two of 
Harold's brothers. 

Then came a new quarrel in 1058 between ^Elfgar and Harold; 
^lfgar was again outlawed, returned to his alliance with Griffith of Wales, 
and gave him his daughter Ealdgyth in marriage. Again Harold offered 
him pardon and peace, and he was restored to his earldom ; and again 
Harold turned to chastise Griffith, who in 1063 was killed by his own 
people. Two years later Harold endeavoured to cement his own alliance 
with the house of Leofric, then represented by Edwin and Morkere, the 
sons of Leofric, by marrying their sister Ealdgyth, the widow of the Welsh 
king. ^Elfgar himself had died in the interval and was succeeded in 
Mercia by his elder son Edwin. 

In the interval also, probably in 1064, occurred Harold's involuntary 
and disastrous visit to Normandy. For some reason unknown he had taken 
ship, and was wrecked on the territory of Guy of Ponthieu, a vassal of 
William Duke of Normandy. William made Guy hand over his captive, 
and then, as a condition of release, required that Harold should take the 
oath of allegiance to him and should swear to do his best to secure him 
the succession to the English throne. With death or permanent captivity 



Taking toll for merchandise. 
[From a Saxon Psalter.] 




From an Anglo-Saxon Psalter. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 35 

in a dungeon as the probable alternatives, Harold took the oath, which, 
according to tradition, was made the more awful by having been uncon- 
sciously sworn upon sundry particularly sacred relics. Seeing that the 
election of the king of England lay entirely with the Witan, the extent 
of the obligation involved is problematical, even apart from the question 
whether oaths taken under such circumstances are to be held binding. At 
any rate William or his supporters felt it necessary to make a great point 
of the peculiar sanctity which had been im- 
parted to the oath by the trick of concealing 
the sacred relics from Harold when he took it. 
Having taken the oath, whatever it was 
worth, Harold returned to England to find 
that his brother Tostig had been so playing the 
tyrant in Northumbria that the folk of that 
earldom drove him out and elected in his 
place Morkere, the younger son of ^Elfgar, and brother of Edwin now 
Earl of Mercia. Harold refused to back up his ill-conditioned brother, 
as he had refused to back up Sweyn ; Tostig was dismissed into exile, and 
Morkere was confirmed in the earldom of Northumbria. Finally Harold, 
as already noted, married Ealdgyth, the sister of the two LeofricsonSe 
For the third time he had the opportunity of crushing the rival house, 
which, technically at least, was guilty of fomenting rebellion; and for the 
third time he chose to seek instead peace and recon- 
ciliation. 

But now King Edward himself was dying. The 
one Englishman manifestly fit to succeed him on the 
English throne was Earl Harold. The sole repre- 
sentative of the blood royal was young Edgar the 
^theling, whose father, Edward, the son of Edmund 
Ironside, had returned with him from Hungary to 
England some years before, only to die himself 
within a few months. The whole principle of suc- 
cession had been turned upside down by the inter- 
lude of the Danish kings ; and the Witan no longer 
•felt itself bound to choose the one representative of 
the house of Cerdic when it was obvious that a strong 
man was needed on the throne and the yEtheling was a mere boy. 
Whatever promises Edward the Confessor may have made to William, he 
undoubtedly himself nominated Harold as his successor. The day after 
Edward's death Harold was unanimously elected by the Witan, and was 
crowned by the Archbishop of York, because there were doubts as to 
the validity of the position of Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

But, if there was no direct opposition in England, Harold had to reckon 
with the jealousy of the young earls of the North, and with at least three 
possible claimants on the continent. There was no doubt at all that the 




A Saxon slinger. 



36 NATION MAKING 

Duke of Normandy would strike for the crown of England, although he 
had no conceivable title except the alleged promises of Edward the 
Confessor and Harold, neither of whom had any power of bestowing the 
crown whatever. Then there was Sweyn of Denmark, Knut's nephew ; 
and there was at least a possibility that Harald Hardraada of Norway might 
grasp at a crown which rested so insecurely on its wearer's head. Harold 
himself was king by election only, without any hereditary title ; and he had 
nothing to trust to but his own abilities and the loyalty of the nation to his 

person. The Danelagh was 
quite as likely as not to 
declare for the king of 
Denmark if once the ques- 
tion were seriously raised ; 
and in the meantime the 
exiled Tostig was intriguing 
on all sides against the 
brother who had allowed 
him to be banished for his 
crimes. 

Harold threw himself 
vigorously into the work 
of organisation in right 
kingly wise, and of pre- 
parations for naval defence. 
No less energetic was the 
Duke of Normandy, who 
gathered to his standard by 
degrees not only all his own 
vassals, but every adven- 
turous baron and knight in 
Western Europe who could be enticed by promises of land and loot. Also 
he took care to obtain the blessing of the Pope on an expedition directed 
against the perjured blasphemer who occupied the throne of England, and 
who was, moreover, in league with an Archbishop of Canterbury whose 
appointment in the Pope's eyes had been uncanonical. For Stigand had 
obtained the archiepiscopal pallium from a Pope who had been ejected 
from the chair of St. Peter and was not recognised by his successors. 
Sweyn of Denmark looked on, but hesitated to act. Tostig tried some 
raiding in Northumbria on his own account, but was driven off by Edwin 
and Morkere ; whereupon he sailed north and presently joined forces with 
Harald of Norway, who had taken the seas with a great fleet. 

Meanwhile Harold the king had manned his fleet in the South, waiting 
and watching for the imminent attack of the Norman duke. But the winds 
blew out of the North and the Norman did not start. The supplies of the 
fleet ran short, the ships were becoming damaged, and at last when Harold 




The King upon his throne. 
[From an nth century Book of Prayers.] 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 37 

had to send them round to the Thames to refit, they were caught in a gale 
and so badly battered as to be useless. At this moment came news from 
the North that Harald Hardraada was on the coast. With all the forces 
he could gather on the way and the best of his Wessex troops, Harold 
dashed to York, where he found that Hardraada and Tostig had already 
routed Edwin and Morkere and the levies of their earldoms. At Stamford 
Bridge, a few miles from York, he brought the Norsemen to bay ; and 
there was fought a desperate battle, in which Hardraada and Tostig were 
both slain and the Norsemen were put utterly to rout. The Norse Chronicle 
is magnificent but wildly imaginative in its account of the great fight ; the 




Plan of the battle of Senlac and the surrounding country, 

[From Creasy's " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World."] 

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how at the last a single mighty Norseman 
held the bridge while his comrades retreated, until he was thrust through 
from a boat below. . 

The danger from Norway was over, but meanwhile the winds had 
changed. The Norman had put to sea, and within a week of the great 
fight of Stamford Bridge the news reached Harold of his landing at 
Pevensey. South again raced Harold at full speed, reaching London upon 
the tenth day after the fight, far faster than Edwin and Morkere could 
move with the Northern levies, whether they were loyal or not, considering 
how they had already suffered at the hands of the Norsemen. With all 
speed Harold collected whatever troops he could draw together and 
hurried down to Sussex, where the Norman was wasting the land ; resolved 
to give battle rather than follow the more prudent policy of devastating 



38 NATION MAKING 

the land before him and forcing William to pursue him and fight at a 
disadvantage. 

He took his stand on the hill of Senlac, lining the whole ridge. On 
the morrow William attempted to storm his position by direct frontal 
attack, since a flank movement was not practicable. The foot soldiers 
could not break the line ; then William hurled his mailed horsemen against 
the English shield wall. The English held their ground. The horsemen 
on the left wing broke and swept back down the slope, the half drilled 
English burst from their lines and rushed in pursuit. William saw his 
opportunity, flung another detachment of cavalry upon the pursuers, and 
broke in upon the now unguarded flank. But still the English held their 
ground against charge after charge, till at last the Normans on the right 
fell back in feigned flight. The English thought the victory was won, 




Senlac : Harold receives an arrow in his eye and dies. 
[ From the Bayeux Tapestry. ] 

and poured down upon them, except the valiant disciplined body of 
Harold's huscarles, who still stood in their ranks. The rest had no chance 
when the Normans turned and charged again upon them. The huscarles 
fought on stubbornly against odds now overwhelming, till William brought 
forward his archers, bidding them shoot so that their arrows should drop 
from above upon the stubborn Saxons. Harold's eye, says tradition, was 
pierced by an arrow ; but he, his brothers, and the huscarles fought and 
fell to the last man round the royal standard. So perished the last English 
king of the old English. 

HI 



THE ANGLO-SAXON SYSTEM 



In reconstructing the early social and political system of the English 
we have to find bridges whereby we can connect what we know of the 
primitive Germans with what we know of the Saxons from the legal codes 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 39 

which have been preserved and by historical references from which definite 
inferences can be drawn. 

Now, at the stage when we have clear and trustworthy indications of 
an established system in England, which is not until after the establishment 
of Christianity, we find in the first place that kingship is universal, that the 
kingly office is hereditary, but that the succession invariably leaves a 
certain right of choice exercised by a council known as the Witan or 
Witenagemot. Usually the choice lies among sons and brothers of the 
deceased king ; but it appears to have been considered legitimate on suffi- 
cient grounds to go further afield among those who could claim to represent 
the blood royal. It was a matter of primary necessity that the king should 
be himself a reasonably competent person, and obviously inefficient candi- 
dates were necessarily excluded. Thus Alfred succeeded .^thelred in Essex, 
although ^thelred left two young sons, and Eadred was preferred before 
the sons of Edmund. 

In the next place we find a nobility, not limited to a few families of 
high descent, though these appear to have formed an element in it, but 
entered primarily as a reward of service ; though rank once attained tended 
to remain with the descendants. This aristocracy falls into two ranks, in 
which, theoretically, descent, except in the royal family, is not concerned — 
the king's lieutenants or ealdormen, along with the bishops, and the thegn- 
hood f who may be called the gentry. Below these were the great mass of the 
free ceorls, who held the greater part of the soil ; and at the bottom of the 
scale were the actual theows or slaves, few in number in the East, but com- 
paratively numerous on the Welsh marches, from which, incidentally, it 
may be inferred that in the later stages of conquest, immediately preced- 
ing the introduction of Christianity or accompanying it, the Britons were 
enslaved rather than extirpated. 

The constitution of the King's Council or Witan is much debated, as 
also are its powers. It is quite clear that the Witan, whatever its constitu- 
tion, did control the succession and choose the new ruler on the demise of 
the king. It is also clear that whenever a king promulgated laws the code 
was prefaced by statement that it was issued after consultation with and 
approval of the Witan. We may be confident that no king would venture 
to introduce marked innovations without first securing the acquiescence of 
that body. The Witan, which was thus formally consulted, seems generally 
to have consisted of the bishops and ealdormen ex officio, and some other 
nominated members. On the other hand, when the Witan assembled to 
make choice of a king it would appear that the freemen at large were 
entitled to put in an appearance and take their share in the proceedings. 
In fact- it looks as if the king under ordinary circumstances acted on his 
own responsibility, but in questionable matters disarmed possible opposition 
by taking the council, so to speak, into partnership and securing the agree- 
ment of the magnates of the realm ; while the magnates, when the king 
died, in their turn took the freemen into partnership by admitting them 



4 o NATION MAKING 

to ratify the choice of the new monarch. On these occasions the Witan 
stands as a survival of the ancient assembly of the tribe in arms; though, as 
a matter of fact, it had degenerated into an assembly of the magnates and 
the free population in the neighbourhood where the assembly was held. 

In all this we can see an absolutely plain evolution from the ancient 
tribal system as depicted by Tacitus. When. joint action was undertaken 
by the tribes, the war-lord was chosen by the tribal assembly ; and the 
elected war-lord developed by degrees into the hereditary monarch. The 
war-lord had his council of the heads of the clans or great family groups 
within the tribe, who, in the later stage, were displaced by the ealdormen, 
who were the heads not of clans but of districts, as clan organisation yielded 
to district organisation ; and the organisation of the Church involved the 




The King presiding over the Witan. 
[From an nth century MS. illumination.] 

admission of the ecclesiastical heads to this group. Schemes of primary 
importance were submitted for ratification to the tribal assembly, which 
normally merely signified its acquiescence by the clashing of arms, but was 
capable of expressing a disapprobation of which judicious leaders would 
take due heed. But expansion meant that the tribal assembly expanded 
also into a national assembly, which was unwieldy and impracticable. It 
was entirely undesirable that the freemen should be expected or indeed 
should be willing to gather from all parts of the country to attend such 
an assembly ; so for ordinary purposes the national assembly ceased to 
exist, because no one except the magnates would take the trouble to attend 
it, and it survived only in a very mutilated form for royal elections and 
not much besides. 

Now the primitive organisation was definitely tribal, resting on kinship, 
having as its basis the family, rising to the group of families forming the 
clan, the group of clans forming the tribe, and the group of tribes forming 
what for want of a better term we must call the nation. Where a tribe 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 41 

migrated bodily the tribal system would remain in full force. When it 
took possession of its new territory it occupied the soil in groups of house- 
holds who were all closely akin to each other ; and the aristocracy — those, 
that is, who enjoyed a general prestige, formed the inner council, and 
provided the war-lords — were the chief families of the clans, the families 
which were regarded as most directly representing the real or hypothetical 
common ancestor. But migration was not necessarily a tribal act. It 
might be merely the movement of a restless group of adventurers who, as 
volunteers, joined the standard of a leader bent on roving exploits. In such 
cases the tribal or clan system would break down, and kinship would be 
only the occasional, not the invariable, basis of the settlements of the con- 
quered country ; while prestige would attach not to the hereditary clan 
chiefs, but to the warriors who achieved distinction and who were admitted 
to the personal companionship of the war-lord, his "comrades" (gesiths) 
and u servants " (thegns). The English invasion partook of both characters. 
The hosts were sometimes mixed bands of adventurers, and were sometimes 
tribal ; while even the mixed bands might sometimes comprise whole clans 
or substantial groups of kinsfolk. 

Consequently on the new soil it would be natural to find both principles 
at work, and that expectation seems to be in full accordance with the state 
of things which emerges when the conquest is completed. Place names 
repeatedly mark obvious groups of kinsfolk, family names, as in practically 
all cases such as Billington, Wellington, and the like, where the suffix ing 
is to be found; 'but in other places the ham, tun, or wick has a personal 
name which rather implies that the settlement was not that of a family 
group. 

And in like manner the local magnates, though occasionally claiming 
high descent, had generally lost the character of clan-chiefs. The clan- 
chiefs had been displaced by the king's thegns, the men whom the war-lord 
had honoured, or their descendants. The ealdorman appointed by the 
king to represent him in the provinces as his territory expanded was no 
longer an ealdorman in right of his position in the clan but in right of 
appointment as a minister of the state ; and his position was not hereditary, 
though there was an inevitable tendency to the retention of the office in 
the same family whenever it was capable of providing a competent successor. 
As kingdoms grew they were parcelled out into districts which, in Wessex, 
were called shires, each under the king's representative, the ealdorman, 
and the king's shire-reeve or bailiff, who was primarily concerned with the 
king's financial business. There is good ground for holding that the 
Wessex shires corresponded to the minor principalities which were absorbed 
by the king of Wessex. The ealdorman was a sort of lieutenant-governor 
and commander of the military forces of the shire, while the reeve was 
the king's financial agent and at the same time a sort of vice-lieutenant- 
governor. At a later stage, when the ealdorman became the earl and in 
Latin the comes, the sheriff was in Latin the vice-comes. 



4 2 NATION MAKING 

State policy, war, peace, and legislation belonged to the king and the 
council. Legislation, however, was not, as in modern times, a matter 
habitually engaging the central government. The law meant established 
customs, conditions, and conventions. Conditions changed slowly, and 
legislation meant merely the adaptation of customs to changed conditions ; 
therefore it was very rarely required. When Christianity was introduced 
yEthelbert of Kent had to modify the existing code so that it might square 
with Christian ideas. Again variations of custom were introduced locally, 
so that from time to time it became necessary to codify customs and impose 
a degree of uniformity. Hence come the codes or " dooms " of successive 
kings ; and when such codes were issued the kings took the opportunity of 







The King and his Thegns. 
[From a MS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.] 

introducing such modifications of their own as were likely to be generally 
approved. Such almost exclusively was the character of legislation under 
the Saxon kings. 

Apart from high policy and legislation the business of government lay 
with the local authority, and the local authority was the local assembly of 
freemen. The local unit was the tun or township, the village, the group of 
households whose members occupied the surrounding land, and settled such 
of their affairs as required settlement in the town's meeting. The townships 
were grouped in hundreds, a term which probably originated in days when 
the normal village contained ten households or thereabouts, and ten villages 
or thereabouts, making up approximately a hundred households, were 
grouped together for military purposes and for the common settlement of 
their affairs. So the freemen of the hundred assembled periodically in the 
hundred-moot to arrange common action and administer justice. Similarly, 
to deal with the larger matters whereby the whole district or shire was 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 43 

affected, the freemen of the shire gathered periodically to the shiremoot 
to perform functions which had originally been discharged by the tribal 
assembly. 

Justice was administered in these "folk-moots" or popular meetings, 
each under the presidency of its reeve — town-reeve, hundred-reeve, or shire- 
reeve. Primarily it appears that the whole body were judges. At a later 
stage, when the number of households in the hundred had very much in- 
creased, a kind of representation took the place of the general assembly of 
all freemen. The princi- 
pal landholders were ex- 
pected to attend, and from 
each township the parish 
priest, the reeve, and the 
four " best men," as well as 
those who were personally 
concerned in any questions 
arising. Further, it seems 
to have become customary 
for a sort of committee of 
twelve to act as judges in 
place of the whole body ; 
and probably it is to this 
custom, already established 
by the time of Alfred, that 
we must attribute the tradi- 
tion that Alfred himself in- 
vented Trial by Jury. On 
the other hand, it is also 
likely, though not certain, 
that the prestige attaching to the person of the reeve of the court gave him 
a practical authority, which gradually made him in effect a superior magis- 
trate ; and that out of the jurisdiction thus acquired by him grew the 
jurisdiction of the lord of the manor. 

The " dooms " of the kings are mainly concerned with crimes of 
violence, or at least 'injury to person or property. The penalty was 
habitually in the form of a fine — the wercgild payable as compensation to 
the injured person or his relations by the wrong-doer or his kinsmen, and 
the wite payable to the crown. By the end of the ninth century the amount 
of the fine was assessed precisely according to the rank of the injured 
person, and there was an elaborate scale of payments according to the 
injury. Thus the ordinary free ceorl got more compensation for the loss of 
an eye than for an injury to his hand ; but the thegn got bigger compensa- 
tion than the ceorl for a like injury. As a general principle the wrong- 
doer was personally responsible for paying a proportion of the fine, and his 
kinsmen were responsible for seeing that the balance was paid, the Saxon 




Saxon tower of Sompting Church, Sussex. 



44 NATION MAKING 

system, as already noted, being primarily based on the idea of kinship. But 
the system of kinship did not apply universally to all settlements even at the 
outset, and did so less and less as time went on ; hence, at a later stage, the 
joint responsibility of the kinsfolk gave place to the joint responsibility of 
the district or group of householders which formed a tithing. The whole 
system of the weregild appears to have been invented in order to get rid of 
the old system of the blood feud. When, under primitive conditions, one 
member of a kinship, called a maegth, was injured, the whole family took 
the matter up and avenged it on the maegth to which the injurer belonged, 
and so retaliation was endless. The point of the weregild was that, when 
the fine had been paid, the feud was ended and further retaliation was not 
regarded as justifiable, but became, as it were, a breach of the king's peace. 
Here, again, what Alfred and his successors did was to systematise the con- 
flicting practices which had grown up in different parts of their realm. 

There is perhaps nothing in which our modern ideas stand in more 
marked contrast to those of early times than the administration of justice. 
For us the point of first importance is that no man shall suffer if there is 
any reasonable shadow of a doubt of his guilt. In the medieval view it was 
more important that the crime should somehow be punished than that the 
innocent should escape ; hence the doctrines of common local or family re- 
sponsibility. But still more curious is the change in the conception of 
evidence ; our insistence on positive proof is so marked that merely cir- 
cumstantial evidence has to be extraordinarily strong before it is allowed 
to carry weight. But apart from cases where the criminal was taken 
practically red-handed, the evidence which satisfied our forefathers was hard 
swearing not so much to facts as to character. The accused, when the 
evidence as to facts was not obviously conclusive, was held guilty unless 
he could support his own oath of innocence by producing substantial 
" witnesses " to his character ; and the value of their oaths was assessed 
according to their social position. The final appeal of the accused was to 
the justice of Heaven, the " ordeal " which found its later counterpart among 
the Normans in the Wager of Battle on the hypothesis that God would 
defend the right and give victory to the innocent. For anything like our 
modern sifting of evidence there was no machinery whatever. 

The whole system of land settlement and land tenure is a matter of 
much controversy. The primary type of settlement with which we must 
start is that of the group of households planted together and forming a tun 
or township. To the township was allotted a sufficient area of land, of which 
only a part was at once taken up for cultivation and meadow land, while 
the remainder was waste land and common property. The land brought 
under cultivation was allotted to the different households in strips of an acre 
or half an acre, each household originally receiving altogether a hide of a 
hundred and twenty acres ; that is usually one hundred and twenty strips, 
for the half acre was probably a later subdivision. But the strips of each 
household were not contiguous. Supposing there were ten households, 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 45 

each household had one strip in each group of ten strips, the strips being 
separated merely by balks or ridges. They were worked in common by the 
labour and the plough-teams of the whole community, though each household 
took the produce of its own strips. This is what is called the Open Field 
System. 

As far as this system is concerned, the expansion of the population 
would find its needs met partly by taking in more of the waste land and 
partly by the planting of new settlements, since for some centuries there was 
much more land available than could be brought under the plough. But 
individuals were also allotted more than a single equal share — more than the 
individual household could work. In the later stages the possession of 
five hides of land entitled a man to claim rank as a thegn. Moreover, whole 



A Saxon banquet at a round tablet 

estates were allotted to the king, which he, in his turn, could bestow upon 
others, or could apply to ecclesiastical endowment. How were these larger 
estates worked, unless a large subject population had been preserved 
which was set to labour upon them in a more or less servile character ? 
The difficulty of believing that any large proportion of Britons was thus 
preserved, except on the Welsh marches, has already been dwelt upon ; 
although there is strong reason for supposing that the class in Kent called 
laets did fall under this category. The riddle in fact is not solved. 
But it seems reasonable to suppose that where a large estate was granted 
there would be many members of large households who would be willing to 
become in a way tenants of the great landholder in preference to accumu- 
lating upon their own houshold " hide." The thegn, therefore, would plant 
his estate with workers, dividing it up among them in the same way as in 
the free-land community, but reserving to himself a share of the strips, the 
occupiers of the rest holding their strips on condition of cultivating his 
strips for him. 




46 NATION MAKING 

Whether or no this be on the whole a correct account of the course of 
development, what we do find in the later times is that in most villages, 
though not in all, the villagers were bound, according to the size of their 
holdings, to render a fixed amount of service in cultivating the lands of the 
lord, the tenure of their own holdings being conditional only on the rendering 
of this service. The enormous majority of these occupiers of the soil did 
not forfeit their political freedom and their political rights merely because 
they held their land on condition of service ; and they remained in their 
own eyes and in those of every one else free ceorls. 
The expansion of households and the movements of 
population also led to the subdivision of the original 
hide, so that by the eleventh century at least the ceorl's 
normal holding was thirty acres. It must be added that 
there was also an actually servile population — to be 
accounted for partly by slaves originally brought with 
them by the invaders, partly by descent from the Briton 
women who were spared, and partly by captives taken 
in early wars between the English themselves and be- 
tween English and Britons. Actual slaves, however, never 
formed more than a small proportion of the population. 

Broadly speaking, then, we have these divisions : thegns 
and great landowners who held estates which were partly 
axongeeman, nt demesne i anc j s — that is, reserved to themselves — and were 

century. ' 

partly occupied by tenants who had to cultivate the 
demesne land and also, as a rule, to make some sort of payment in kind — 
fowls or pigs or grain. Next there were the free ceorls who had no great 
estates, but occupied their holdings under the original free tenure, owing 
service to no man. Next there were the free ceorls who occupied their 
holdings on condition of service to the lord — holdings which might be 
anything from five acres or even less up to one hundred and twenty, but 
were most commonly either thirty or fifteen acres. And last there were 
the theows or the serfs who, if they had a plot of land at all, held it merely 
by grace of their owner. Land which any one had acquired by grant or 
written agreement was known as boc-land; while land which was held 
simply by customary tenure was known as folc-land. 

The village aimed at being self-sufficing — at producing for itself all 
that its inhabitants required. Commerce consisted practically in the 
exchange of superfluities for goods of which there happened to be a 
deficiency. Each village supplied its own necessary artisans — the smith, 
the thatcher, or the carpenter — who was paid primarily not for the job, but 
for doing whatever turned up to be done in the village, by having a 
holding allotted to him, or being freed from his share in the common work 
of tillage, a system which gradually gave way to payment by the job. 
Payment was ordinarily made in kind, since there was very little money 
available, just as commerce was conducted by barter, not by money pay- 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 47 

ments. In the same way when the lord wanted extra work done which 
was not in the bargain he made payments in kind to the workmen, which 
were only beginning to be to a small extent replaced by payments in cash 
in the eleventh century. Towns in the modern sense, large aggregates of 
populations mainly taken up with the business of making and exchanging 
goods, had hardly come into existence, though there were a few places 
like London which formed exceptions to the rule. Here and there where 
traffic accumulated, as at bridges and fords, cross roads and shrines to 
which pilgrims congregated, there were larger communities ; and when in 
the days of Alfred and his sons fortified points were established either for 
strategic reasons or for the protection of places which had already acquired 
some importance, there the population tended to increase, attracted by the 




The old English burh, or fortified place. 
[From a MS. in the Bodleian Library.] 

greater security. Hence the borough of later days got its name from 
having been at first a burh or fortified place. But the population even of 
the borough was mainly occupied with agriculture ; and in the days of 
the English conquest the mere idea of a town was so foreign to English 
conceptions that practically all the towns which had grown up during the 
Roman occupation were not preserved by the conquerors, but were 
destroyed and not rebuilt. 

The English had the character of sea-rovers like the Northmen after 
them, when they first invaded Britain. But they ceased to pay attention 
to the sea. Not being in any sense commercially minded, they sought no 
intercourse with the peoples across the channel; and they only began to 
be seamen again when King Alfred perceived that a strong navy provides 
the most effective defence for an island. In fact, until the Danish incursions, 
the idea of national defence hardly presented itself. When a king went 
to war with his neighbour he called the freemen in general to arms, all 



48 NATION MAKING 

freemen being liable to serve in the fyrd, the fyrd being summoned by 
shires which, probably in Wessex where the system arose, originally 
corresponded to sub-kingdoms. When the fyrd was summoned, the ceorl 
put on his armour and marched to the field with his sword on his thigh, 
and probably with his scythe fixed endwise on a pole. Hence the bill of 
later days was merely an adaptation of the scythe transformed into a spear. 
When the fighting was over he went home and turned his bill into a scythe 
again. And he always objected to being summoned anywhere outside his 

own shire. Alfred reorganised the fyrd, so 
that only a portion of the freemen were 
summoned at one time, and the ordinary 
agricultural operations could still be carried 
on while the force was in the field. 

Saxon and Dane alike fought on foot ; 
but the Danes taught the English the ad- 
vantage of preparing entrenched and palisaded 
positions. In 871, the "year of battles," 
the Danes saved themselves from destruction 
by falling back to their entrenchments when 
defeated in the field, and against their palisades 
the Saxon hurled himself in vain. It was in 
imitation of the Danes that Alfred and his 
offspring created the fortified posts into which 
garrisons could be thrown, as it was from 
the Danes that Alfred learned to build im- 
proved ships of war. The Danes were also 
made formidable through their appreciation 
of the usefulness of rapid movement. They 
made it their first business on landing to sweep 
in every horse they could lay hands on. But they used horses for transit 
not for fighting ; possibly for pursuit and flight, but not for charging in 
the field. The incapacity of the English in general for grasping the uses of 
cavalry were largely responsible for the overthrow at Hastings. They had 
no cavalry, and the only way to pursue a flying foe was to break their own 
line and rush forward from behind their shield-wall or palisade ; — authorities 
are not in agreement as to whether their position at Hastings was actually 
palisaded. William the Norman finally won the day by anticipating the 
methods of Edward I. in attacking an infantry which proved impenetrable 
to unaided cavalry charges. He combined artillery with cavalry, and his 
bowmen made breaches in the enemy's ranks into which his horsemen could 
penetrate. But the might of the bow was only perfected after more than 
two centuries, and even then the English, and the English alone, possessed 
it in perfection. At Hastings the Norman used only the short bow, an 
instrument infinitely less powerful than the later long-bow, though it served 
its purpose against troops which had no cavalry to drive the archers 




Anglo-Saxon spears, &c. 



KINGS OF THE ENGLISH 49 

out of range, and no archers of their own. For two hundred years 
after Hastings no foot-soldiery seem again to have stood against the charge 
of mailclad horsemen. 

Of the early English literature little needs to be said, for little enough 
has been preserved. Early writers wrote for 
the most part in Latin ; in the vernacular 
there is practically nothing before Alfred ex- 
cept the ancient song of Beowulf, which dates 
from pagan times, and the poem of Caedmon, 
written about 670, based upon the Book 
of Genesis. Under Alfred's direction began 
the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 
a work of much historical value, which has 
also the credit of preserving the fine lay of 
the battle of Brunanburh, of which some lines 
have been quoted. Alfred also deserves gratitude for translating and 
editing standard historical and philosophical works of his own time. But 
the great king's own high ideals of education scarcely took any very deep 
root ; and perhaps the early eighth century, when Bede flourished at 
Jarrow, was the only time at which the English stood in the front rank of 
their contemporaries as a nation among whom culture and learning 
flourished. 




In the stocks, nth century. 



CHAPTER III 

THE NORMANS 

I 

THE CONQUEROR 

HAROLD'S efforts had failed to make a united nation of the English. 
Wessex and East Anglia, which had known Harold himself as earl, were 
loyal to him ; Mercia and Northumbria were ill-disposed to the house of 
Godwin, and the young earls, both of them of the house of Leofric, were 
either jealous of Harold or too lacking in vigour and decision to throw 
themselves whole-heartedly into a struggle against the Norman. It was 
Harold, not they, who saved the North from Hardraada, but they left him to 
defend the South from the Norman entirely with the levies from Wessex 
and East Anglia. It was not the national army which William had beaten 
at Senlac. Nor would even a national army have been likely to prove 
successful against the invader, because the English nation refused to 
recognise that the conduct of war was a scientific operation. It relied 
entirely on hard hitting, and declined to adopt new methods. Nor were 
the men who formed the fyrd adequately trained even in their own 
methods ; Harold's disciplined huscarles alone stood in their ranks when 
the temptation to charge became strong. It seems as if Harold was the 
one man in England with a head on his shoulders, and that he came to 
grief through not realising the extreme stupidity of his countrymen. 

After Hastings a solid party of those who knew that they had forfeited 
all prospect of favour at the hands of the Norman were eager to maintain 
resistance, and they succeeded in persuading the Witan at London to elect 
young Edgar the ^Etheling king. But neither the boy himself nor any one 
near him was competent to organise a fresh defence. And there was 
another section who had already despaired of offering any effective re- 
sistance to the Conqueror, and were resolved to try and make their peace 
with him at any price. Sickness prevented the Conqueror and his army 
from moving at once ; but the delay that a strong man might have used 
for vigorous reorganisation only gave the English time to grow more 
jealous and suspicious of each other. When William did move he did not 
march straight upon London, but struck across the Thames at Wallingford, 
thus interposing his army between the South and any possible succours 
from the North. Edgar, sundry bishops, the Londoners, and all the leading 

5° 



THE NORMANS 51 

men who were still in the South, came in and made submission, offering 
William the crown, which was duly set on his head at Westminster on 
Christmas Day. 

William intended to reign not as conqueror but as lawfully elected 
king, though he had to satisfy his followers. He would act according to 
law himself and would compel his followers to do so ; but that did not 
prevent him from interpreting the law as best suited him. And it suited 
him to claim that Wessex and East Anglia had been in rebellion against him 
as their lawful sovereign, and that 
there was merely a difference of 
degree between those who had 
fought against him in arms and 
those who had failed to fight for 
him. Consequently all lands in 
Wessex and East Anglia were for- 
feited ; the less "guilty" of the 
English were then permitted to re- 
cover possession at a price, receiving 
their lands back as tenants from the 
king ; but most of the land was not 
restored to the English proprietors, 
but was distributed among the ad- 
venturers and barons in William's 
train, always as property of his own 
granted to them on feudal tenure. 
The royal estates William appropri- 
ated. Edwin and Morkere and Waltheof, the son of Siward of Northumbria, 
who held the earldom of Huntingdon, were not deprived of their earldoms, 
but were kept by William in attendance on himself ; and he now considered 
the position sufficiently secure to warrant his withdrawal to Normandy, 
there to set matters in order. He left his half-brother Odo, Bishop of 
Bayeux, in charge south of the Thames, and William Fitz-Osbern in 
charge of the country north of the Thames up to the Tees. 

But the Frenchmen, as William's followers were inclusively termed, 
behaved after the fashion of the time as masters of a conquered country ; 
insurrection flamed up in the West. Within the year William was back 
again. Submission was prompt when William marched upon Exeter, but 
Northumbria and Mercia chose to declare for the ^Etheling. Again 
William's approach was met by submission. He bestowed a contemptuous 
pardon on Edwin and Morkere, while the ^Etheling took flight to Malcolm 
Canmore in Scotland, where that long-headed ruler gave him an asylum, 
but at the same time was at pains to secure what would now be called an 
entente between himself and the Conqueror, to whom it is also possible that 
he rendered some very indefinite homage. 

But as soon as William's back was turned Northumbria again broke 




Great seal of William I. 



5 2 NATION MAKING 

into revolt and was again reduced to immediate submission by the rapidity 
with which William reappeared in the North. Then in the late summer 
Sweyn of Denmark took his turn and sent a great mixed fleet to the 
Humber, whereupon Northumbria and the Fen country again rose and 




England and the Lowlands under Normans and Plantagenets. 



cut up the garrisons which William had left. This new northern insurrec- 
tion and invasion gave the signal for sporadic insurrections all over the 
country. Again William sped to the North, drove the Danes into the district 
of Holderness, where he could not attack them without a fleet, and then 
proceeded to lay Yorkshire desolate. Twenty years afterwards, if the case 
of one district may be regarded as a fair sample, three-fourths of the York- 
shire villages were uninhabited, and the remainder had only a fraction of 




THE NORMANS S3 

their former population. In the winter — we are still in the year 1069 — ■ 
William ravaged westwards to Chester and Shrewsbury, and in the mean- 
while the Danes came out of Holderness and sacked Peterborough, after 
which they made up their minds that there was no hope of a conquest 
and took their departure. 

The last struggle of resistance was left to the half mythical hero, 
Hereward the Wake, who formed his " camp of refuge " at Ely, whence he 
struck right and left at the Normans, and where he held out until the end 
of 1071. The traditions con- 
cerning him are faithfully em- c ££t ? 
bodied in Charles Kingsley's 
novel which bears his name. 
The conquest may be said to 
have been completed in 1072, 
when William marched into 
Scotland and again obtained a 
submission from Malcolm Can- 
more, whose recent marriage to 
the ^Etheling's sister Margaret 
was a somewhat serious menace 
to the peace at least of Nor- 
thumbria. The astute Scot dis- 
missed Edgar himself from 
Scotland, at the same time counselling him to make his peace with William 
and become his man — advice which the ^theling subsequently took and 
never had reason to repent. But Malcolm at the same time got for him- 
self a grant of lands in England for which he did homage ; and Scottish 
historians have always claimed that whatever homage was thenceforth 
rendered by a king of Scots to the English king, with one exception, was 
rendered not for the Scottish crown but for those lands south of the Tweed. 

The long series of insurrections and their suppression meant the exten- 
sion to all England of the principles which had been adopted in Wessex. 
Wherever there was a rising, lands were confiscated and bestowed upon 
Frenchmen, while only a few of the English were reinstated. Confiscations 
did not apply to the holdings of the ceorls, who remained in occupation, 
holding from the new French lord or the reinstated Saxon lord theoretically 
on the same terms as before. The new lords were not permitted to build 
castles at large; the Norman "keeps" were constructed by licence of the 
king. The effect of the piecemeal process of conquest and confiscation was 
that in each new region the lands were distributed among a number of 
Frenchmen ; so that, although one man might be lord of a great amount 
of territory, his several domains were scattered up and down the country 
instead of forming one large unit. Single estates in many cases corre- 
sponded to shires and formed earldoms ; but no earldom was great enough 
to give the earl a chance of standing to the king in any such relation as the 



Normans at dinner. 
[From the Bayeux Tapestry.] 



54 NATION MAKING 

great feudatories of France, such as the Duke of Normandy himself, bore to 
the French king. 

The fact may or may not have been due to deliberate policy on the part 
of the Conqueror ; it is quite sufficiently accounted for as the natural 
outcome of the way in which the confiscations were carried out ; but the 
practical effect was to secure the crown against the absorption of excessive 
power by any one vassal. The position of the crown was further fortified 
by its right of control over the marriages of vassals, so that the king could 
prevent a dangerous accumulation of estates by the marriage of a great 
baron to a neighbouring heiress. The earls on the Welsh and Scottish 
marches were necessarily granted large powers because those regions were 
open to attack from Scotch and Welsh ; but they would have had to act 
together in order to have any chance of resisting the Crown ; and the power 
of every earl was checked by the power of the sheriff who, though fre- 
quently he was a great baron, held his office entirely at the king's pleasure. 

This situation was not altogether pleasing to the great Norman barons ; 
and when there was a rising in 1075 it was an insurrection not of the 
English but of the Norman barons, the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk, who 
inveigled Waltheof into their conspiracy. Their grievances, as might have 
been expected, were connected with the prohibition of a marriage between 
the two families and the interference of sheriffs with what the earls regarded 
as their rights. But Waltheof was an incompetent conspirator ; his 
conscience got the better of him, and he revealed the plot to Lanfranc, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, then acting as justiciar while the king was 
abroad. The attempted insurrection collapsed, the English shire levies 
obeying the call of the government ; as they habitually did when the Crown 
appealed to them against the barons, who were their immediate oppressors. 
The execution of Waltheof removed the last of the Saxon earls, since 
Edwin and Morkere had blotted themselves out in the days when Hereward 
was holding his camp of refuge at Ely ; and there was no other attempt on 
the part of the barons to set William ai defiance. When in 1082 the 
king's half brother, Odo of Bayeux, began to form ambitious projects of his 
own, even although they were not ostensibly directed against the king, 
William threw him into prison and no one ventured to espouse the cause of 
the bishop. 

Once again danger threatened the realm in 1086, when Knut of Den- 
mark, Sweyn's successor, designed a great invasion. The assassination of 
Knut completely exploded the project ; but the danger had forced unusual 
preparations on William, who gathered a great folc-moot at Salisbury, where 
all the landowners were required to take the oath of allegiance to the king, 
whether they were tenants-in-chief holding directly from him or held land 
from other overlords. The principle was implied that allegiance to the 
king overrides allegiance to a vassal of the king. 

It is of fundamental importance to realise that in theory the system of 
the government of England was continuous and was not changed by the 



THE NORMANS 5 $ 

Norman Conquest. The old institutions remained. The Witan and the 
various folc-moots remained. The fyrd remained. The ceorls occupied 
the land on the same tenure as before. The relations of the Church to the 
Crown and the Papacy were theoretically unchanged. But it is no less 
necessary to realise that 
in actual practice the 
changes brought about 
by the conquest were 
enormous. 

At the root of these 
was the fact that the 
native magnates in 
Church and State were 
entirely displaced by 
foreigners. Nearly 
every great landowner 
or ecclesiastic was a 
foreigner, who inter- 
preted his position and 
his powers in accord- 
ance with, the ideas to 
which he was accus- 
tomed. They were 
foreigners, mo/eover, 
who looked upon the 
English as a conquered 
and inferior population ; 
and the conquered popu- 
lation had no practical 
means of redress, what- 
ever brutalities might be 
inflicted upon them. 
Commonly enough they 
sought redress by taking 
the law into their own 
hands, thereby bringing 
down upon themselves 
increased brutality at the 
hands of the lawless, and inviting severity at the hands of the government 
and of those officials whose business it was to enforce the law. Hence 
arose the one piece of legislation which formally distinguished between Saxon 
and Norman. An especially heavy penalty was imposed for the slaying of a 
Norman ; and if the slayer were not discovered the hundred was liable foi 
the whole fine. A hundred years later Richard Fitz-Neal explained in his 
Dialogue on the Exchequer that a murdered man was assumed to be a 




Arches in the nave of St. Alban's Abbey Church. 
[Built by Abbot Paul between 1077 and 1093.] 



5 6 NATION MAKING 

Norman unless proof was forthcoming that he was not; and by that time 
the presumption was that any one outside the class of villeins had some 
Norman blood in his veins, because inter-marriage had become the general 
practice, and the two races outside the villein class were indistinguishable. 
But at the outset the effect must have been to intensify the sense of race 
antagonism. 

Otherwise the legislative innovation felt most grievously by the English 
was the Forest Law, which introduced unheard-of penalties, especially that 
of blinding for the slaying of deer. William " loved the tall deer as he had 
been their father." Great tracts, notably the New Forest, were converted 
into game preserves, and villages and churches were desolated if they fell 
within the regions appropriated by the Crown to hunting. Domesday 
Book shows clearly enough that the actual desolation was much less than 
later tradition made it out to have been ; the real popular grievance was 
that hunting was forbidden where before it had been free, and poaching 
was savagely penalised. It is rather curious to observe by the way that 
William all but abolished the death penalty, though, on the other hand, a 
repulsive system of mutilation was substituted for it. 

The last flame of the English resistance to the Conqueror was stamped 
out five years after he seized the throne. No long time elapsed before the 
insurrection of Roger Fitz-Osbern of Hereford and Ralph Guader of Norfolk 
— the latter apparently of mixed English and Breton descent, though he 
fought on William's side at Hastings — taught the barons once for all the 
futility of defying King William, the more emphatically because his own 
presence was not required for their suppression. Administration during 
his absence was largely in the hands of Archbishop Lanfranc, for William 
himself was frequently occupied in Normandy, owing partly to dissensions 
with his eldest son Robert and with his nominal suzerain, the king of 
France. 

It was while engaged in a war in Maine that the Conquerer met his 
death from internal injuries caused by the stumble of his horse. Normandy 
he left to Robert with whom he had become reconciled. To the English 
succession he commended his second son William. To the third son 
Henry, the only one born after his accession in England, he left only five 
thousand pounds, in the confident conviction that he could take very 
good care of himself. " A very wise man was King William," says the con- 
temporary English chronicler, "and very mighty ; of a power and dignity 
greater than any that went before him. Mild he was to the good men who 
loved God, and beyond measure harsh to the men who gainsaid his will. 
Thrice every year he wore his crown as often as he was in England ; and 
then were with him all the great men all over England, archbishops and 
bishops, abbots and earls, thegns and knights. Also he was a very stark 
man and cruel, so that none durst do anything against his will. Not to be 
forgotten is the good peace that he made in this land ; so that a man who 
in himself was aught might go over his realm with his bosom full of gold 



THE NORMANS 57 

unhurt. Nor durst any man slay another, had he done ever so great evil 
to the other. Surely in his time men had great hardships and many 
injuries. Castles he caused to be made and poor men to be greatly 
oppressed. He fell into covetousness and altogether loved greediness. The 
great men bewailed and the poor men murmured thereat ; but so stark was 
he that he recked not of the hatred of them all ; but they must wholly 
follow the king's will if they would live or have land or property or even 
his peace." 

II 
WILLIAM AND THE CHURCH 

When the Duke of Normandy claimed the crown of England he 
obtained the papal blessing for his enterprise from Pope Alexander II., 
under the guiding influence of Hildebrand, who himself succeeded to the 
papacy as Gregory VII. in 1073. Hildebrand was the incarnation of that 
papal policy which claimed for the Vicar of Christ a supremacy over all 
temporal rulers ; for the voice of Christ's Church an authority to which 
all merely temporal authority must submit ; and for the whole clerical 
order, Christ's ordained ministers, a position independent of the secular 
state and separated from its jurisdiction. The remoteness of England had 
at all times kept the clergy of England from feeling themselves practically 
amenable to the 'discipline of Rome ; and the Conqueror secured the papal 
favour partly because it was certain that the insular separateness of the 
Church of England would be broken down by the infusion of a large 
Latin element, and by the introduction in high places of French and Italian 
clergy bred within the sphere of the Roman influence. 

This was one practical effect of the Conquest. Vacant bishoprics and 
abbacies were filled up with the foreign clergy, who enforced the stricter 
discipline on which Hildebrand and the whole of his school insisted. The 
uncanonical Archbishop Stigand was deposed from the see of Canterbury, 
and the reorganisation of the Church was entrusted to his successor, 
Lanfranc of Pavia, whom William had made abbot of Caen eight years 
before. William and Lanfranc understood each other thoroughly ; and 
neither the king nor the archbishop had the slightest intention of sur- 
rendering to Rome a jot of their own authority in England. Whatever 
Hildebrand may have expected, the papal demand that William should 
acknowledge himself as holding England as a fief of Rome met with 
courteous but unqualified rejection. William would admit of no question 
that the king was supreme in his own dominion, and that no man, lay 
or clerical, should appeal against his authority to any other authority 
whatever. Such duty as his predecessors on the English throne owed 
to the Pope he too would pay, but nothing more. 

Gregory launched thunderbolts against every one who should be con- 



58 NATION MAKING 

cerned in what was called Lay Investiture, a subject which continued to be 
a burning question until well into the twelfth century ; but William was 
supported by Lanfranc in maintaining the right of the king of England 
to control important ecclesiastical appointments. Gregory insisted on the 
celibacy of the clergy, secular as well as monastic. But whereas all monks 

were under an express vow 
of celibacy, the clergy outside 
the "regulars" or monastic 
orders were under no such 
vow, and their marriage was 
merely forbidden as a matter 
of "discipline. Hence the 
prohibition had been very 
commonly disregarded. 
Therefore, in spite of Gregory, 
all marriages already con- 
tracted by the clergy were 
in England recognised as 
valid, though no marriages 
contracted after the papal 
decree were to be recognised. 
One substantial change, how- 
ever, was made by William 
and Lanfranc, in the complete 
separation of the ecclesiastical 
from the secular courts of 
justice, probably in 1076 ; 
and in the same way some- 
what earlier was instituted 
the practice that the clergy 
assembled at the Great 
Council should deliberate 
apart for the framing of 
ecclesiastical legislation. In 
other words, the principle of 
differentiation between clergy 
and laity, of emphasising the 
distinction between them, which was an essential part of Hildebrand's 
policy, was accepted and acted upon by William and Lanfranc without 
setting Church and State in antagonism, but with the effect in later years 
of bringing whatever antagonism there was between Church and State into 
more marked relief. 




An aisle in the Chapel of St. John, Tower of London. 
[Built by William the Conqueror.] 



THE NORMANS 59 



III 

ENGLAND AND THE CONQUEST 

In point of law the Norman conquest was supposed to have made no 
change in the government of England. The old institutions remained in force. 
The king ruled, taking counsel with his Witan. The freemen still assembled 
in the shire-moot and the hundred-moot for the conduct of local affairs. 
The ealdorman of early days, the earl, by his Latin title the comes, was still the 
chief man of his earldom, which was again reduced to the proportions of a 
shire. The king's financial officer, shire-reeve, or sheriff was still the Crown's 
principal agent in the shire, discharging also certain administrative functions 
which justified his Latin title of vice-comes. The Crown still descended by 
election of the Witan from among the royal family, though it was a new 
dynasty which occupied that position, since throughout the eleventh century 
the exclusive title of the house of Wessex had been persistently ignored. 
Still as of old the freeman was bound at the summons of the sheriff to 
attend the gathering of the fyrd in arms, and still the thegn, the holder of 
comparatively extensive lands, was bound to bring to the field a following 
in due proportion. Still, as before, the soil was tilled on the Open Field 
System mainly by occupiers bound to render some sort of agricultural 
service to a large'landholder to whose demesne or private holding their hold- 
ings were in some sort attached ; and still for a time most of these occupiers 
were politically free men, though they did not hold their land by a free 
tenure. 

But in substance a very great change had been effected, which is illus- 
trated by the character of the Witan. We have seen that under the Saxon 
kings tne name of the Witan appears to have been applied both to a sort of 
inner council consisting of the chief officers of the realm, lay and ecclesi- 
astical, together with some other persons called in by the king; and also 
to a general assembly, the relic of the old tribal or national assembly, at 
which all freemen were entitled to appear, although very few thought it 
worth while to do so.' It appears, though it is by no means clear, that this 
double character of the Witan was reproduced in two forms of council — the 
magnum concilium, great council or council of magnates, and the commune 
concilium, or general assembly of tenants-in-chief, a term which we shall exa- 
mine later. But in less than ten years after the battle of Hastings practically 
every one of the magnates was a Norman, not an Englishman, interested in 
strengthening his own class against the hostility of the natives ; and the same 
principle applied to the assembly of the tenants-in-chief, although these in- 
cluded a proportion of English. The magnum concilium was summoned for 
general purposes of deliberation, while the commune concilium was called 
together only when it was desirable that a particular operation or a parti' 



Such an occasion 




A Norman bed. 



60 NATION MAKING 

cular policy should be ratified ostensibly by the nation, 
was the moot of Salisbury in 1086. 

Now, not only were the old native magnates replaced by magnates who 
were foreigners, brought up in different traditions and wholly out of sympathy 
with the native population, but the actual powers of the magnates were 
greatly extended. Under the new system they exercised a much larger 
personal jurisdiction than before. How far this was conscious innovation, 
the deliberate introduction of Norman practices, and how far it was an un- 
conscious interpretation of English customs 
in the light of Norman practices, it is im- 
possible to say with certainty. In practice 
it is probable that the official presidents 
of the folc-moots of the hundred and the 
shire had exercised an authority which 
could without any great difficulty be trans- 
lated into an independent jurisdiction ; but 
the actual result now was that a vast amount 
of actual jurisdiction was transferred from 
the folc-moots to the local magnates, the 
lords of the manor, who, in the great 
majority of cases, were Normans. The 
law previously referred to concerning the murder of Normans shows 
how the conquering race, a handful planted among a hostile population, felt 
it necessary to make special regulations for their own protection, and it is 
natural that they should have found means to evade the jurisdiction of 
native popular tribunals, more or less as the British in India insist on a 
similar security for themselves. But consciously or unconsciously the 
innovation was enormous, while it pretended to be at the most an adap- 
tation of the existing system. 

It used to be assumed as a commonplace of history that the Normans 
introduced feudalism into England. At last there came a reaction, and we 
were taught that feudalism in England was already so far advanced that the 
Normans merely gave a slight extra impetus tq its complete development. 
As a matter of fact the advocates of these contradictory doctrines did not 
mean quite the same thing by feudalism, or at least they concentrated 
their attention on different aspects of it. The basis of feudalism was the 
doctrine that the whole land was the property of the king and that the indi- 
vidual landowner was not in the full sense an owner, but held his land as 
a tenant of the king, by the grant of the king, on recognised conditions of 
military service. Where this had not been the case originally, when the 
landowner had been there before the king, before the land had formed a part 
of the king's dominion, the same position had been arrived at by the process 
of Commendation ; that is, the landowner had done homage to the king and 
become the king's man, himself surrendering his land to the king and then 
receiving it back on condition of military service. In either case the 




Tending the sheep. 




Cutting timber. 




Cutting grass for hay. 




Throwing the hawk. 

Scenes in English out-door life in the nth century. 

[From a Saxon Calendar in the British Museum.] 

61 



62 NATION MAKING 

practical result was the same. Every inch of the land within the king's 
dominion was the king's property, and was held from him by the landowner 
as his vassal on the recognised conditions of military service, carrying with 
them corresponding obligations on the king of protecting his vassal. 

The same thing applied to the minor landholder who had either received 
his land by a grant from the greater landowner originally or had become 
his vassal by commendation. Finally, the small occupiers held their land 
not on conditions of military service, but of agricultural service or some 
equivalent, still with the corresponding obligation of protection ; either by 
grants from the owner, or by commendation. Thus every inch of the soil 
was held on condition of military or other service either by a vassal of the 
king or a vassal's vassal, except what was retained by the king as his own 
estate. 

Now, after the Norman conquest all this was literally true in England. 
The king had assumed the ownership of the entire soil. He assumed that 
it was forfeited to him by rebellion ; and whether he distributed it among 
his Norman followers or graciously reinstated the English occupiers, it was 
on condition of homage and under feudal tenure. But before the con- 
quest it had not been true. There was no theory that all the land was the 
king's land and had been granted by him on conditions of military tenure. 
Under the feudal system when the king wanted an army to take the field 
he summoned his vassals to attend his standard in accordance with their 
feudal obligation. Under the Saxon system he summoned the freemen of 
the shire to attend the fyrd. But, on the other hand, the process of com- 
mendation had long been active. Although the larger landholders did not 
hold from the king theoretically, except where the king had granted part of 
his estates as bocland, the small occupier habitually became the man of 
some bigger man than himself, rendering him service in order to enjoy his 
protection. But the theory that the whole of the land was the king's land 
held by the landowner as his vassal on feudal tenure did not as a legal 
theory exist before the conquest. 

Of this there is one consequence of great importance. When the Norman 
wanted an army in the field he could raise one by summoning the feudal 
levies. But he could also attain his purpose by summoning the fyrd of the 
shires, and calling the freemen to arms without the peculiar limitations on 
the terms of service recognised under the law of feudal tenure, of which the 
elaborate details had hitherto been practically unknown in England. 

If the feudalism introduced by the Norman conquest was something 
exceedingly different from feudalism so far as it had already developed in 
England, it differed also from the feudalism of the continent in a manner 
which had very important political results. On the continent a king's 
personal vassals or feudatories were few ; each of them had an estate which 
might be called a province. The province was parcelled out among the 
vassals of the feudatory and his vassal's vassals ; and in each case the 
vassal did homage and owed allegiance to his own immediate overlord, 



THE NORMANS 63 

but not necessarily to his overlord's overlord ; therefore the feudatory who 
defied his overlord or " suzerain " could take the field with an army of his 
own vassals, who were sworn to serve him even against his suzerain. But 
in England, as we have seen, the country was not parcelled out into a few 
great provinces but into many comparatively small earldoms and lesser 
estates ; and, further, the smaller landowners for the most part held direct 
from the king. They were tenants-in-chief, i.e. with no overlord intervening 
between them and the king himself. The result was that there was no 
feudatory who could bring a large army of his own into the field under 
any circumstances ; and beyond this, from the Moot of Salisbury onward 
the king always required that his vassal's vassals should pay direct homage 
to him as well as to his overlord, the obligation to him overriding that 
to the immediate overlord. 

Thus on the continent the moral responsibility for rebellion lay upon 
the great feudatory himself alone ; the oath of his vassals required them to 
follow him. But in England the moral responsibility rested on each indi- 
vidual ; his oath bound him to the king's service in priority to that of his 
overlord. The moral justification on the continent for the individual was 
that he had obeyed his overlord's summons as in duty bound ; the only 
possible justification for the individual in England was that the king had 
forfeited his allegiance by breaking the feudal compact on his own side ; 
whether negatively by failure to do right by his vassal or positively by 
making illegal demands upon him. Hence the central government in Eng- 
land was at all tirrfes very much stronger than in the continental states. 

Both before and after the Norman conquest the king was expected under 
ordinary circumstances to live " of his own " ; that is to say, to pay all the 
expenses of government as well as what we should call his personal expenses 
out of his own regular revenues. Those revenues were drawn partly from 
his personal estates. These estates were always being reduced by grants 
to individuals, by way of reward, or to the Church. On the other hand, 
they were increased by forfeitures when a vassal indulged in open treason 
or persisently refused to carry out his feudal obligations. Also they were 
increased by « escheat " ; that is, when a vassal died leaving no heir with 
a legal claim to inherit, his estates reverted to the Crown. The next source 
of royal revenue was ,in the fees or dues payable by vassals upon various 
occasions. Thus, when death caused an estate to change hands the heir 
had to pay fees to his overlord upon taking up his inheritance ; and there 
were further dues payable while the heir was a minor and in connection 
with the marriage of heiresses. These were always payable by the vassal 
to his overlord, and, consequently, to the king in connection with the estate 
of every- tenant-in-chief. The terms tenant-in-chief and baron appear prim- 
arily to have been practically interchangeable ; and in this wide sense of the 
term baron the old thegnhood was in effect absorbed, since the thegns 
or those who took their places and lands were all tenants-in-chief, holding 
from the king. Finally, as regular revenue, the Crown claimed judicial 



64 NATION MAKING 

fines and various local dues in the shape of tolls, the price paid for 
local privileges. 

But beyond these the Crown had a special claim to what was in theory 
a war tax, the tax on land called the danegeld. This was the name origin- 
ally given to the tax which ^thelred raised by the advice of his Witan in 
order to pay his ever-increasing ransoms to the Danes. As ransom it was 
raised for the last time by Knut in his first year, when he doubled the 
greatest of the previous exactions and finally paid off the Danish host. 
But from that time the danegeld was levied by the kings, nominally as a 
war tax and apparently at their pleasure ; and in it the Conqueror and his 
son William II. found an exceedingly productive source of revenue. But 
however mercilessly the Conqueror might exact every penny which could 
be got out of the land, he wished to do it scientifically and with an even 
hand ; and it was with this object in view that he instituted that great 
survey of the country which was recorded in Domesday Book and the docu- 
ments connected therewith in 1086, being the report of the commission 
which had been employed upon the work for some time previously. 

Domesday Book was compiled with the object of ascertaining precisely 
the taxable value of the land all over the country. It does not include the 
northern counties, partly because of the greater difficulty of dealing with 
those wilder regions, and partly because William himself had so harried 
them that their taxable value was of very little account. Having this 
object in view, it took account of everything which affected either taxable 
value or the means of collecting taxes. Although, unfortunately, what was 
perfectly clear to contemporaries is not always equally clear to later ages, 
Domesday Book is a valuable and unique authority as to the condition 
of the country, in spite of the difficulties of interpretation. 

In Domesday we first come across a very important and very contro- 
versial term, the manor. In actual practice the manor very frequently 
corresponds to the individual settlement — tun, township, ham, or village- — 
which was the unit of the Anglo-Saxon system, a unit which in the 
Norman terminology becomes the vill or villa. Hence came the idea long 
prevalent that the manor and the vill were originally identical ; that each 
vill had its lord of the manor with his private demesne, while the rest of 
the soil was occupied chiefly by the villeins, villani, vill-people, who owed 
him service. But this is not the actual fact, though it approximates to it. 
The manor is not necessarily identical with a vill ; it may extend over 
many vills. The vill is not necessarily identical with a manor ; its occupiers 
may own half-a-dozen different lords or no lord at all. The manorial 
arrangement, therefore, cannot have been part of the original settlement, 
but was a subsequent development or extension of what was at first only 
occasional ; when the free ceorl found it advisable to commend himself 
to some lord, even then the ceorls of one community did not necessarily 
elect to commend themselves to the same lord, though it was more often 
convenient to do so than otherwise. Thus we find quite small holdings 



THE NORMANS 65 

described as "held for a manor" without having any lord of the 
manor. 

In fact it would appear that the Domesday manor is a term meaning a 
taxable unit. The lord of the manor is responsible for the taxes of all 
holdings within his manor, whether it forms one vill or many vills or in- 
cludes holdings in several vills. The man who holds his "virgate" or 
thirty acres without a lord at all holds it " for a manor " ; while the men 
who hold of a lord are divided 
into two classes — the freemen, 
liberi homines, and "socmen," who 
normally pay their taxes direct, 
but for whom their lord is 
ultimately responsible ; and the 
villeins, bordars, and cottars 
whose taxes are paid by the lord 
himself. To these last are to be 
added the actual servi or slaves. 
It does not appear that at this 
stage there was any political dis- 
tinction between these two classes; 
they were nearly all free ceorls. 
Nor is there any definite distinc- 
tion between the methods of 
tenure. In both' classes there 
are men who pay a rent in kind 
but render no agricultural service, 
and in both classes there are men 
who do render agricultural ser- 
vice ; though there are compara- 
tively few of the former among 
the villani and comparatively few 
of the latter among the socmen. 
It is further to be observed that 
socmen and freedom from agri- 
cultural service were, much commoner in the districts where there 
was a substantial Danish population, where also slaves were practically 
non-existent, while slaves were comparatively numerous on the Welsh 
marches. But it is also easy to see that while there was nothing in 
itself servile in the payment of taxes through the lord any more than 
there is anything servile in " compounding " for rates at the present 
day, the man who did so could be much more readily reduced to a 
servile condition ; and consequently a hundred years later we find that 
the villein has degenerated into a serf bound to the soil, whereas the 
socman has not. Also the villein has come to be more and more 
identified with the man who has to submit to particularly obnoxious forms 

E 




An ideal plan of a Norman castle. 



66 



NATION MAKING 



of service from which the socmen and the successors of the socmen are 
free. 

Domesday, then, was not occupied with the classification of the occupiers 
of the soil according to the amount of freedom which they possessed, but 
with the taxable value of their holdings and with the question who was 
responsible for paying the taxes ; and hence we derive from it no light on 
the amount of control possessed by the lord of the manor over the socmen 
or villeins on his estate. What we do have recorded is the nature of the 
service or rent which they were liable to render, and the most minute 
details as to the value and productive uses of the land. 

The record also shows that during the first year after the conquest 




A manor-house of the nth century. 

[From a Harleian MS., British Museum.] 

large numbers passed out of the class of socmen into the class of villeins ; 
although at a later stage the double tendency developed to commute 
services for rent, and to treat freedom from services as a prima facie proof 
of freedom as opposed to serfdom, the essential feature of the later 
serfdom being that the villein was bound to the soil and could not leave 
his holding without his lord's consent. It is not, however, at all clear 
that at the time of the conquest the villein was in this sense a serf ; 
the idea of serfdom may have become attached to villeinage through the 
interpretation of customs by Norman lawyers trained in the theories of 
Roman law. 

Norman castles sprang up as we have noted all over the country ; but 
we must not imagine that the ordinary Norman baron habitually lived 
in one of those stone fortresses. William's followers were endowed with 



THE NORMANS 67 

few manors or with many ; the baron or tenant-in-chief who got one 
manor lived in his manor-house, which was no more than a substantial 
farm-house ; if he had more than one manor he might move from one 
manor-house to another, or he might fix his own residence in one or two 
and plant his bailiffs in others. But the manor-houses were not supple- 
mented by castles except with the king's leave, and with the intention of 
making them serve as military centres for holding the country down. 



IV 



RUFUS 



William I., the Conqueror, 1066. 



Robert of Normandy. 

I 
William le Clito. 



William II. , 
Rufus, 1087. 



Henry I., 1100. 



Adela, m. 

Stephen of 

Blois. 



William 
(drowned). 



Maud, m. 

(1) Emperor 
Henry. 

(2) Geoffrey 
of Anjou. 



Theobald 
of Blois. 



Stephen 

of Boulogne, 

"35- 

I 

Eustace. 



Henry, 

Bishop of 

Winchester. 



Henry II. , Plantagenet, 
1154. 



Of the Conqueror's sons, Robert the eldest was a valiant soldier, the 
only man of his time who got the better of the old Duke in single combat. 
He was good-natured, indolent, and irresolute. The Conqueror held him 
in complete contempt, 

and only allowed him THE NORMAN LINE 

the succession in Nor- 
mandy because he 
could not help himself. 
Whereat the barons 
rejoiced, since f they 
knew that Duke Robert 
was wholly incapable 
of controlling them. 
Richard, the most pro- 
mising of the family, 
died before his father, 
who commended the 

third son William the Red to the English succession. William Rufus 
was as fiercely energetic as his father, a typical headstrong, self-willed, 
fighting man, who regarded not man nor feared God except when the 
terror of death came upon him. His energy took him in fits, and while 
the fit was on him' he pursued his immediate purpose with vigour 
and determination ; but he lacked his father's dogged patience ; and 
while he was capable of forming vast designs, he was not capable of 
planning them out and developing them systematically. And between 
the fits of energy he surrendered himself entirely to the pursuit of pleasure 
and the gratification of his passions ; while his sole virtue besides physical 
courage was his appreciation of courage in others. 

Such was the man whom William I. commended to Lanfranc and 
Lanfranc commended to the magnates of England as his successor. William 
hurried over from Normandy while his elder brother was far away. On 
his promise to be guided by Lanfranc he was immediately accepted as king. 



68 



NATION MAKING 



Within six months came the first revolt in favour of Robert A large 
proportion of the barons of England were barons of Normandy also, 
whom it suited much better to owe allegiance only to the incompetent 
Robert than to owe it to Robert for their Norman possessions and to the 
fierce Red King for their lands in England. William promptly appealed 
to his English subjects, who joyfully answered the summons to the fyrd 
and the chance of striking a blow against their oppressors ; while William 
made them large promises of good government. The revolt was crushed 

and the promises were cynically 
ignored. Lanfranc died, and 
William took for his chief coun- 
sellor Ranulf Flambard, a fit in- 
strument for his purposes. 

Ranulf's primary object was 
to enrich the king and himself 
more or less under cover of law, 
and he set himself to systematic 
business of extortion and robbery. 
Fortunately for the people of 
Englandtheextortionand robbery 
were directed against William's 
feudal tenants ; that is to say, 
Normans rather than English, 
partly because there was more to 
be got out of them, and partly 
because it was more necessary for 
the king to keep them under his 
heel. And for this latter reason 
also William's hand fell heavily 
upon them when they in turn 
applied robbery and extortion 
to the English ; it suited him to have the English on his side. But 
where he himself or his own chosen companions were concerned a like 
protection was not extended to the people. 

In one of its aspects the story of the reign appears to be a mere welter 
of wars and compositions with Robert of Normandy, and of conspiracies 
and revolts on the part of one baronial group or another, ferociously 
stamped out, which it is hardly worth while to disentangle. William was 
an able soldier, who nearly always struck swiftly and fiercely, and nearly 
always with success. The outstanding fact of importance was that the 
supremacy of the Crown was in every case triumphantly asserted. Perhaps 
the episode of the reign most characteristic of the man and his time was 
that which concerns the relations of William with the Church. One of 
Ranulf's devices for obtaining revenue was that whenever one of the higher 
ecclesiastical appointments fell vacant it was allowed to remain so, and 




Seal of Archbishop Anselm, 1093. 
[From Ducarel, "Anglo-Norman Antiquities."] 



THE NORMANS 69 

William seized the revenues for himself instead of putting in a financial 
administrator during the period of vacancy. It was not till four years 
after the death of Lanfranc that a new Archbishop of Canterbury was 
appointed ; and then it was only because William was stricken with a severe 
illness, and in the fear of death endeavoured to square his account with 
Heaven by naming the saintly Anselm of Bee for the archbishopric. 
When William recovered he returned to his old courses; but he found 
that Anselm's apparent meekness cloaked immovable resolution whensoever 
questions of right and wrong were involved. He was not in the least 
afraid of rebuking the king to his face, nor could he be terrorised into 
submission to the king's will when the king required him to do what he 
thought wrong. It was not long before the position became unendurable, 
when, curiously enough at first sight, the bishops took the king's side and 
the barons with grim unanimity supported the Archbishop. But Anselm 
took the only dignified course and withdrew from the country. 

Of less importance to England than to Europe was the beginning in 
William's reign of the crusading movement. The recovery of the Holy 
Sepulchre and its retention under Christian dominion for two hundred 
years carried off to the East occasionally great hosts of crusaders and, 
besides these great expeditions, a constant stream of military pilgrims. 
English crusaders, however, belonged chiefly to the latter group. The only 
crusade which takes a prominent place in our own history is that which 
took Richard I. to Palestine. England was touched only by the fringe of 
the crusading movement, and was affected by the first crusade only because 
it took Duke Robert of Normandy away, and thereby stopped for a time 
the quarrels between him and his brother in England, and afterwards enabled 
his younger brother Henry to secure the English throne without difficulty. 

The years when Rufus was reigning in England were of considerable 
importance in the history Of Scotland. On his accession Malcolm Canmore 
was still reigning in the northern kingdom with his English Queen Margaret 
at his side. His own English predilections have been noted, and his whole 
reign was marked by the Anglicising movement and the transfer of the 
political centre of gravity from the Celtic highlands to the Teutonised 
lowlands ; a change, however, which, instead of tending to a fusion of 
the English and Scottish nations, made the once English Bernicia, or so 
much of it as was comprised in Lothian, more intensely antagonistic to 
the southern English of the English kingdom than had been the Celts of 
the kingdoms of the Scots and Picts. The Celts of the highlands retained 
for the Saxons, the " Sassenachs," of Scotland, very much of the sentiment 
which they had formerly felt towards the English, and resented their 
political supremacy more than they feared an English domination. Malcolm 
himself had no friendly feeling for the Normans, who had ousted his wife's 
family from the English throne ; and he found various excuses for raiding 
across the Tweed, though, when either William I. or William II. marched 
against him, he generally succeeded in making terms satisfactory to himself. 



7 o NATION MAKING 

But on one of these raids he was killed, in the fourth year of the Red King's 
reign. 

Margaret had taken care that Malcolm's children should be extremely 
English, and the Scots, jealous of southern influence, made Malcolm's 
brother, Donalbane, king instead of one of the sons of Malcolm and 
Margaret. In this temporary revolution Donalbane was also supported by 
alliance with the Norsemen, by whom the Hebrides were to a great extent 
occupied, and with the king of Norway. It is not improbable that the 
ultimate success of Donalbane would have meant the partition of Scotland 
into a Celtic and a Norwegian kingdom, with further results which offer 
ample room for interesting speculation. But after sundry vicissitudes 
Edgar, one of Malcolm's sons, recovered the throne of Scotland largely by 
the help of volunteers from England, who were permitted to join him on 
condition of his promising allegiance to Rufus. Norway was bought off 
by what was practically the cession of the Hebrides. Edgar personally 
remained loyal to his pact with the king of England, though his successors 
did not hold themselves bound by it ; and Malcolm's house was permanently 
established on the Scottish throne. 

The evil days of William Rufus were brought to a sudden conclusion. 
In the year noo, before Robert of Normandy had returned from the first 
crusade, William went a-hunting in the New Forest, and an arrow from the 
bow of one of his companions killed not a stag but the king. The body 
was left lying where it fell, while those who had seen the accident galloped 
off with the tidings to Prince Henry, who was one of the hunting party, 
and Henry, without a moment's delay, made straight for Winchester to secure 
the royal treasure, and, having done so, to secure his own succession to the 
throne of England. 

V 

THE LION OF JUSTICE 

Henry had over his brother Robert the practical advantage of being on 
the spot. He claimed a prior right to the succession on the ground that 
he was born on English soil, son of the king of England, whereas Robert 
was born a foreigner before his father won a kingdom. The blood of 
Alfred ran in his veins, since his mother Matilda was descended from that 
daughter of Alfred who married Baldwin II. of Flanders. Robert's advocates 
were outnumbered among the barons and clergy, who were at the moment 
assembled in sufficient numbers to claim the character of a Witan or 
National Assembly. The absent Robert was set aside ; Henry was elected, 
and proceeded to strengthen his position by issuing a charter which was 
accepted in all good faith, wherein he promised to observe " the good laws 
of King Edward " as modified by his father, and to abolish the innovations 
introduced by his brother. Another popular move was the arrest of 




w 2 



o 
2 



THE NORMANS 71 

Ranulf Flambard. Moreover, Henry was shrewd enough to select strong 
and capable advisers and at once to recall Anselm. The support of the 
English population was made certain by his politic marriage with Edith, 
otherwise called Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm Canmore and of 
Margaret, and therefore a princess of the royal house of Wessex. The 
prevailing brutality of the period is illustrated by the fact that Edith had 
apparently actually taken the veil as a nun as the only way of protecting 
herself from some more cruel fate. Anselm himself had no qualms in 
accepting a declaration that though she had professedly taken the veil 
she had not technically " entered religion." 

Henry was not to remain in possession for long undisturbed. In iioi 
Robert was back and succeeded in effecting a landing in England. The 
exceedingly uncertain attitude of the baronage made the issue of a fight 
doubtful ; but Robert was contented to sell his claims for a pension and 
an agreement for mutual assistance in the punishment of traitors. Henry 
was prompt to strike one after another at the great barons whose loyalty 
was dubious or more than dubious. The group of Montgomerie brothers, 
headed by Robert of Belleme, prepared to resist, but others hesitated to 
support them ; the English gladly answered the summons to the fyrd, and 
the rebels took flight to Normandy. During the next few years Robert 
demonstrated his incapacity for restraining the plots of the barons who had 
taken refuge in his dominions ; and Henry took the view that he himself 
had no alternative but to appropriate the control of Normandy to himself. 
The result was a .campaign in Normandy in which Robert was decisively 
defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Tenchebrai, a victory which the 
English foot soldiery, fighting for Henry, regarded as compensation for 
Hastings. Robert was held in custody for the rest of his life, though the 
tradition that his eyes were put out was probably a fiction of later date. 

But troubles were not ended, because Henry did not detain Robert's 
young son William, called the Clito, in his own hands ; and the boy was 
afterwards made the figurehead for rebellions in Normandy and Maine 
which were fostered by the French king. The total result of the conse- 
quent fighting which went on at intervals from mi to 1119 was the 
recognition of Henry as Lord of Normandy, Maine, and Brittany. Henry's 
daughter Matilda or Maud was wedded to the German emperor, Henry V., 
while his son and heir, William, was betrothed to the daughter of Fulk of 
Anjou. With these alliances Henry's power threatened to become over- 
whelming ; but his designs received a check when his son William was 
drowned at sea in the disaster of the White Ship. The Count of Anjou 
then married his daughter to the Clito, who had been restored by his 
cousin's- death to the position of claimant to the English succession, and 
now found new support for his immediate claim to the Duchy of Normandy. 
Henry's arms, however, were again successful, and then the emperor died. 
While Matilda was the emperor's wife there would have been no chance of her 
succession to the English throne ; but although there was no precedent for a 



72 NATION MAKING 

queen regnant of England, Henry now succeeded in persuading the Great 
Council to do homage to her as his heir. Those who took the oath included 
her uncle David, the last of Malcolm Canmore's sons, and now king of 
Scotland, and also Stephen of Boulogne, son of the Conqueror's daughter 
Adela. 

Two years later the Empress Maud, as she is generally called, was 
wedded to Geoffrey, son of Fulk of Anjou ; and the offspring of this 
marriage, Henry, born in 1133, was destined to establish the Plantagenet 

line on the throne of Eng- 
land. The marriage, how- 



ever, was unpopular, since 
Normandy had no inclina- 
tion to find itself annexed 
as a province of Anjou, and 
the barons of England were 
no better disposed. Thus 
in spite of the death of the 
Clito, and the renewal by 
the baronage of their oath 
of allegiance to Matilda, 
Henry was painfully aware 
that his daughter's succes- 
sion might be disputed. For 
there were two grandsons of 
the Conqueror, Stephen of Boulogne and his elder brother Theobald of 
Blois, either of whom might put in a claim, although Stephen could not 
do so without breaking the oath of allegiance which he had already taken. 

In one aspect of his reign, then, a vast amount of Henry's time was 
taken up with the wars and the diplomacy which first established him on 
the throne of England, then secured his grip on Normandy and Brittany, 
and finally was intended to secure the English succession to his daughter. 
We can now give brief attention to his relations with the Church. One of 
his first acts was the recall of Anselm with whom he was on friendly terms 
to the end of the archbishop's life. Nevertheless there was no such co- 
operation between Anselm and the king as there had been between Lanfranc 
and the Conqueror. Though Lanfranc was a great ecclesiastic, he had 
supported William in his determination to surrender no tittle of the in- 
dependence hitherto enjoyed by the kings of England. But Anselm owed 
allegiance first to the Pope. In the last years of the Red King a papal 
decree had claimed new authority, and that claim Anselm felt bound to 
support so long as it was maintained by the Pope himself. Henry, however, 
was as definite as the Conqueror himself in his refusal to surrender rights 
which the Conqueror had claimed. Ultimately a compromise was arrived 
at which practically recognised the king's power of making ecclesiastical 
appointments, and required the higher clergy to do homage for their 




A Norman school about 1 1 30-1 140. 



THE NORMANS 73 

temporalities — in other words their estates — like the lay baronage. But 
Henry surrendered the right of actually investing his nominees with the 
insignia of their spiritual office. For the rest, the king was as firm as his 
predecessor in refusing admission of papal legates or papal letters to the 
kingdom without his leave or the carrying of appeals out of his kingdom 
to Rome. 

The great importance of Henry's reign, however, lies in his organisation 
of the system of government, which provided the foundations upon which 
Henry II. was afterwards to 
build. Henry was perhaps 
not a genius, certainly no 
idealist and no hero ; but he 
was shrewd, far-sighted, deter- 
mined, and in things political 
master of himself. Two 
underlying principles may be 
observed in his policy — the 
disintegration of the forces 
adverse to the power of the 
Crown, and the consolidation 
of the forces making for the 




An organ about the middle of the 12th century. 



power of the Crown. Externally that power was threatened first by 
rebellion which made Normandy its base, and secondly by the pretensions 
of the papacy. How he dealt with these dangers we have seen. Internally 
the danger arose from the power of the barons. Here he was helped by 
the extensive opportunities for confiscation which followed on the various 
rebellions. The greater estates the king retained in his own hand, while 
the lesser he distributed so as to avoid a material increase in the power of 
those who were already strong. Further, he used his rights as suzerain to 
divide inheritances which fell vacant among the sons, so as to separate the 
holders of fiefs in Normandy and fiefs in England, and generally to prevent 
the accumulation of great estates in the hands of single feudatories. In all 
this he simply applied the precedents set by his father. 

For strengthening the Crown the method upon which Rufus had relied 
was the merciless application of sheer brute force. Henry's method was 
the resolute administration of the law without fear or favour, unless it were 
fear of and favour to the king by- ministers dependent on the Crown. And 
even here there was no encouragement to wrest the law in the king's favour, 
though he might and did exact his legal rights to the uttermost farthing. 
It does not appear that Henry was moved by any strong desire to strengthen 
the courts of the shire and the hundred as against the extensive jurisdiction 
which had already been appropriated by the landowners. All that he did 
in this direction was to check the process under which all their functions 
were gradually departing from them, by requiring that they should meet at 
regular intervals. Of great importance, however, was the development of 



74 NATION MAKING 

the practice of sending supervising justices on occasional visits to different 
parts of the country, who took in charge the trial of the more important 
cases, and uniformly applied the law in the shire courts as it was recognised 
in the king's own court, the Curia Regis. Their registered judgments were 
established as precedents, and thus a comparative uniformity was given to 
the law at the same time that the capricious activity of the sheriffs was 
kept in check. These justices, or commissions of justices, with the king 
behind them, had nothing to fear from local magnates, but were rather 
feared by them ; and their exact and even-handed administration of the law 
won for Henry the title of the Lion of Justice. " A good man he was," 
said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler, " and there was great awe of him. No 
man durst misdo against another in his time. He made peace for man 




Officers of the Royal Treasury about 1 140 weighing and receiving coin. 
[From a contemporary Psalter.] 



and beast. Whoso bore his burden of gold and silver, no man durst say 
to him aught but good." 

The Curia Regis, the central court of justice, was always in attendance 
on the king's person. It comprised the great officers of state and law 
officers appointed by the Crown. It was practically the same body which, as 
the Court of the Exchequer, took charge of the national finance and examined 
the accounts of the sheriffs who were responsible for collecting and handing 
in the revenue. For portions of the revenue the sheriff paid a fixed amount, 
and made his own profits off the difference between this agreed sum and the 
amount collected. For the danegeld, however, and the fees and fines 
collected under feudal law, he had to render a precise account. It is to 
be noted that in this reign many payments which had hitherto been made 
in kind were required to be in silver ; a fact which points to a considerable 
increase in the circulation of the precious metals as a medium of exchange. 

Henry was not far short of seventy when he died, a ripe age for a 
medieval monarch. There was no sign of enfeeblement of his powers 



THE NORMANS y$ 

when his end came. His contemporaries regarded him with an admiration 
which his success as a ruler entirely deserved. In spite of his wars on the 
continent and the rebellions in England which marked his first years, he 
gave the country order and peace in marked contrast to the two reigns 
which preceded and followed his own. The measure of bis success is 
shown by the ease with which Henry II. restored and developed the system 
which he had organised, although nineteen years passed between the death 
of the grandfather and the accession of the grandson — years which re- 
present a period of wild anarchy, in which there was no supreme 
controlling force whatever, and the one institution which succeeded 
in maintaining something of its own dignity, some fragment even of a 
higher idealism, was the Church. 



VI 

STEPHEN 

Henry died in Normandy. With all his shrewdness and anxiety to 
secure the succession to his daughter he had omitted to take the somewhat 
obvious step of making sure that she should be present in England at the 
time of his death, though he knew well enough that her succession would 
be unpopular with every class of his subjects. Perhaps the one time in his 
life when Stephen / of Boulogne showed signs of intelligence was when he 
hurried over to England to capture the support of the great officers of state 
and the clergy in claiming the inheritance. The great bulk of the barons, 
who assumed that the election of a king would remain with them, were in 
Normandy. After due deliberation they offered the dukedom and the 
crown to Theobald of Blois, while Geoffrey of Anjou, who cared much 
more about Normandy than about England, was collecting a force on the 
Maine frontier in order to make good his own claims. The election of 
Theobald was interrupted by the arrival of a messenger, who announced 
that his younger brother Stephen had already been elected and crowned by 
the English Witan. The cautious and unambitious Theobald accepted the 
situation and refused to stand in his brother's way. 

Stephen, however, was no sooner crowned than his inefficiency became 
obvious. A very valiant knight in single combat or against any odds, he 
had no vices and no brains, lacking the most elementary notions whether of 
strategy, of diplomacy, or of statesmanship. Therefore, from the very out- 
set all over the country every man began doing that which may have been 
right in his own eyes but was very seldom so in the sight of any one else. 
Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the Empress Maud's illegitimate brother, was very 
soon plotting to place her on the throne. David of Scotland, who, as Earl 
of Huntingdon, had sworn allegiance to her, demanded as the price of 
peace the succession to the earldom of Northumberland .for his own son 




76 NATION MAKING 

Henry, basing the claim on the fact that his own wife was the daughter of 
Waltheof. 

In 1 1 38 the country was ablaze with miscellaneous insurrections, more 
particularly in the west country. In that year David, whose demands had 
not been satisfied, having already harried the border, led a considerable 
host of invaders across the Tweed, and advanced over the Tees. A Scottish 
incursion was more than the Yorkshiremen would endure, and the stout 
old Archbishop Thurstan got together a considerable force to meet them, 

who marched out with sundry sacred banners at 
their head, which gave their name to the Battle of 
the Standard fought at Northallerton. It is curious 
to note that the Englishmen, instead of employing 
the usually successful cavalry tactics of the day, 
dismounted and fought as heavy infantry ; also that 
they fought having clumps of archers intermixed 
with them, which looks very much like a foretaste 
of tactics applied nearly a hundred and fifty years 
afterwards in the Welsh wars of Edward I. and 
developed in the French campaigns of Edward III. 
At any rate the Scots, though in superior numbers, 
met with an overwhelming defeat, due largely to 
the slaughter inflicted by the archers. Nevertheless, 
the victory led to nothing beyond the immediate 
expulsion of the invaders ; and very soon after- 
wards David made peace with Stephen on terms 
rather better for himself than he had demanded 
before the invasion. 

Stephen himself proceeded to quarrel with the 
ecclesiastical party, including his own brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester, 
who had the Pope at his back since he was himself authorised papal legate. 
Nothing could better have suited the empress and her party, who at this 
juncture succeeded in landing in England. The king on the one side and 
the empress on the other began to purchase support by lavishing rights and 
privileges, lands, and titles on every one who asked for them. With the 
exception of Robert of Gloucester, whose interests were bound up with 
those of his sister, no one could be relied upon to remain on one side or 
other for any continuous period ; the civil war was not so much a battle of 
parties as a welter of private wars. Says the English Chronicler : " Every 
powerful man made his castles and held them against him ; and they filled 
the land full of castles. They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the 
land with castle works. When the castles were made they filled them with 
devils and evil men. Then they took those men they imagined had any 
property, both by night and by day, peasant men and women, and put them 
in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture ; 
never were martyrs so tortured as they were. . . . They laid imposts on the 




The English Standard, 
a.d. 1 138. 



THE NORMANS 



77 



towns continually and called it tenserie; when the wretched men had no 
more to give they robbed and burned all the towns, so that thou mightest 
well go all a day's journey, and thou shouldst never find a man sitting in 
a town [that is township or village] or the land tilled." So goes on the 
hideous record of rank unbridled violence "till men said openly that Christ 
and His saints slept." 

Stephen himself was taken prisoner in a battle at Lincoln early in 
1141. His cause seemed to have collapsed, and Maud was elected " Lady 
of England." She in her turn at once, by her 
arrogance and violence and her total disregard 
of the advice of both Gloucester and the king 
of Scots, aroused such a spirit of resentment 
that within the year she was herself a fugitive 
and her brother of Gloucester was a prisoner. 
Then Stephen and Gloucester were exchanged, 
and in a few weeks half the country had again 
acknowledged Stephen. It is scarcely profitable 
to pursue the ups and downs of the fighting. 
Gloucester's death in 1147 threatened to rum 
the Angevin cause ; it was, perhaps, saved by 
the death four years afterwards of Count 
Geoffrey, whose son Henry, then eighteen years 
old, was not long in proving himself a youth of 
extraordinary capacity, vigour, and intelligence. 

So far as concerned the fight between 
Stephen and Maud herself, it had been practi- 
cally won when the empress retreated from 
England after Robert of Gloucester's death. 
But the succession was another matter. 
Stephen's one desire was to secure it for his 
son Eustace ; but he had finally succeeded in 
driving the clergy solidly over to the Angevin 
side. In 11 53 young Henry landed with a small enough force, but one 
which sufficiently enabled him to display his qualities of leadership. The 
tide of favour seemed .suddenly to turn ; Eustace was unpopular, and the 
barons began to come in to Henry. The death of Eustace made Stephen 
careless for the future. Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, intervened to 
negotiate between the rivals, and terms were agreed upon at Wallingford. 
Stephen was to remain upon the throne, but Henry was to succeed him, and 
was to be in some sort associated with him in the government of the 
kingdom ; and in the meantime Stephen, with Henry's support, was to set 
about the ejection of the mercenaries or free-lances, who had been employed 
in large numbers by both sides throughout the struggle, and the destruction 
of the many hundreds of unlicensed castles which had sprung up all over 
the country. Henry, in fact, left Stephen to carry out these stipulations by 




Seal of Henry, Bishop ofWinchester, 
brother of King Stephen. 



7 8 NATION MAKING 

himself ; but only a year remained to him for the fulfilment of his under- 
takings. The something that was done was done with characteristic in- 
efficiency, and the country only began to breathe freely when Stephen died 
to make room for a man who, whatever his faults or merits, was nothing if 
not efficient. 



VII 



SCOTLAND 



Duncan. 



Malcolm III. t Canmore, 1059, 
m. Margaret ^Etheling. 



Donalbane, 1093. 



Edgar, 1098. 



Alexander I., 
1 107. 



David I., 1 1 24. 

I 
Henry of Huntingdon. 



Edith, 7ii. 
Henry I. 



Malcolm IV. 

the Maiden, 

"S3- 



William the Lion, 
1165. 

I 

Alexander II. , 

1214. 

I 

Alexander III. , 

1249. 



A half Saxon royal family was established on the throne of Scotland 
when Edgar secured the throne during the reign of William Rufus in 
England. Since the reconciliation of Edgar the iEtheling with the 

Norman, the under- 
THE SCOTS KINGS current of hostility to 

the Norman dynasty in 
England disappeared 
among the sons of 
Malcolm Canmore and 
Margaret. Those princes 
in fact, themselves, now 
represented the heredi- 
tary claims of the house 
of Wessex, any attempt 
to assert which would 
have been particularly 
absurd in view of the 
relations between King 
Edgar and William Rufus. When Henry I. married King Edgar's sister, 
the family claims, such as they were, were absorbed by the offspring 
of that marriage. But it is curious to observe that on the principles of 
pure legitimacy the kings of Scotland were the rightful kings of England, 
not the Norman line, which, on feudal principles, periodically put in its 
own claim to the overlordship of Scotland. 

Three brothers now reigned in succession. When Edgar died, 
Alexander I. became king with his capital at Edinburgh ; but even during 
his reign the last brother, David, as Earl of Southern Scotland, was practi- 
cally the ruler of the whole of the Lowlands. David was in constant 
contact with the English, and his wife was the daughter of Waltheof. 
Alexander himself was considerably occupied with the repression of the 
rebellious Celts of the North, and with the Anglicising or Normanising of 
the ecclesiastical organisation ; although he was extremely careful to avoid 
doing anything which could be construed into a subjection of the Church 
of Scotland to the supremacy either of Canterbury or York. Perhaps, if 



David of Huntingdon. 



Robert I. Bruce, 
1306. 



THE NORMANS 79 

Alexander had left a son, Scotland might have been parted into two 
kingdoms. As he was childless, David ascended the throne in 1124. 

David's reign of twenty-nine years established the character of the 
Scottish kingdom, both through his failures and his successes. It was 
his ambition to obtain the northern earldoms of England and absorb them 
into the Scottish kingdom ; but though 
he procured from Stephen the grant of 
Northumberland, he did not succeed in 
absorbing it. Tweed and Solway re- 
mained the lasting boundaries between the 
kingdoms. It was not to these ambitions 
that the great importance of David's reign 
must be attributed. It is to be found 
rather in the Normanising of the southern 
aristocracy, in the organisation of the 
Church and the extension of its influence, 
and in the municipal development which 
he fostered. The elements which went 
to make up the Scottish state proved to 
be much more difficult of combination 
than those in England, when Norman 
feudalism and English institutions blended 
together. There ^he Crown took the people 
into partnership in order to hold the law- 
lessness of the barons in check ; then the 
barons took the people into partnership in 
order to hold the lawlessness of the Crown 
in check. The Church generally took the 
side of the law, except when it followed an 
aggressive line on its own account, when 
the king and the barons made common 
cause against it. The Celtic element was 
always insignificant. But in Scotland the 
Celtic element was always active, and 
there were constant' cross currents of 
Celtic tribalism in the North and Norman 
feudalism in the South, both acting against 
the central government, which was, on the other hand, constantly in 
close alliance with the Church against both Celtic and Norman nobility. 
The effect of David's Normanising and ecclesiastical policy was in the 
first instance pre-eminently civilising, and Scottish culture attained a 
higher standard in many respects than that of England. Scotland became 
a nation, and developed a sense of nationality which enabled it to set its 
far more powerful neighbour at defiance ; though the warring elements 
of which the nation was composed kept it internally in a state of anarchy, 




Church of St. Regulus, St. Andrews. 
[A pre-Norman church of ioth to 12th centuries.] 



8o NATION MAKING 

which was hardly checked except by the unifying influence of the common 
hostility to England. 

But all this did not become apparent in the reign of David I., or indeed 
till long afterwards. What was apparent in that reign, which ended a year 
before the death of Stephen, was that Scotland had emerged definitely 
in the character of a state developing on the general lines of European 
civilisation — lines, that is, partly Teutonic and partly Latin ; not on the 
un-Latinised and un-Teutonised Celtic lines which she had been following 
down to the accession of Malcolm Canmore. The politically predominant 
division of Scotland approximated not to Ireland or to Wales, but to 
England ; and her future relations with England were for a time at least 
to be seriously complicated by the fact that the great barons of the Low- 
lands for the most part held fiefs in England as well, and were vassals 
at once of the two kings of England and Scotland. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 



HENRY II 



OF 



HENRY PLANTAGENET, Count of Anjou, was barely. one and twenty when 
he became king of England. Already his audacity and ambition had been 
displayed by the wooing and winning of Eleanor of Aquitaine, an alliance 
which added to his dominions about a quarter 
of the whole French realm. The lady's 
marriage with her previous husband, the king 
of France, had been annulled, owing to incom- 
patibility of temper. With the English in- 
heritance came that of Normandy, carrying 
with it Maine and the over-lordship of Brittany, 
so that in his own right or in that of his wife 
he was actual lord of more than half of France, 
besides having disputed claims on Toulouse. 
In respect of these counties and duchies the 
king of France was his suzerain ; in respect of 
England he was of course entirely inde- 
pendent. The populations which owned his 
sway even on the other side of the channel 
were exceedingly diverse ; and undoubtedly it 
was his ambition to weld all these dominions 
into a consolidated empire. Hence more than 
half the years of his- reign were spent on 
the continent; and we have to realise that 
he was not a king of England with continental 
possessions so much as a great continental 
prince who happened also to be king of 
England. But since he did happen to be king of England it was in this 
country ' that he found scope for his genius as a ruler, while France 
absorbed his talents for war, diplomacy, and intrigue. 

He found England utterly sickened and surfeited with the anarchy of 
Stephen's reign and ready to welcome the strong hand which should put 
down disorder. Young as he was. he displayed at once a combined vigour 

81 f 



THE BLOOD ROYAL 
ALFRED 

Ecgbert, King of Wessex. 

I 
^Ethelwulf. 

I 
Alfred the Great. 

I 
Edward the Elder. 

I 
Edmund. 

I 
Edgar. 

I 
yEthelred the Redeless. 

I 
Edmund Ironside. 

I 
Edward. 

I 

Margaret, m. Malcolm III 

of Scotland. 



I 

David I. 

of Scotland. 

I 

All later kings 

of Scotland. 



Edith, m. 
Henry I. 

I 

Empress 

Maud. 



Henry II. Plantagenet. 

I 
All later kings of England. 



82 NATION MAKING 

and shrewdness which won him support on every side. In nine months 
he had restored order and government. The mercenaries were cleared out 
of the country and the unlicensed castles were levelled to the ground. The 
nobles who dreamed of recalcitrancy, of asserting their right to follow their 
own devices, were paralysed by me swift energy of his movements. Men 
no longer felt that each had to fight for his own hand ; the majority were 
ready enough to combine on the side of law and order when the principles 
of law and order were incarnated in a chief endowed with so vigorous and 
capable a personality. 

Henry took nominally for his chief counsellor Archbishop Theobald of 
Canterbury, a prelate trained in the school of Roger of Salisbury, who had 
been the right-hand man of Henry I. For chancellor he took the arch- 
bishop's brilliant young secretary, Thomas Becket, a man after the king's 
own heart, to whom Theobald willingly relinquished the onerous work of 
the king's chief minister. The administrative system which had been 
organised by his grandfather and had gone to ruin under the general chaos 
of Stephen's reign was restored, and for some years to come Henry allowed 
himself to be absorbed mainly by his continental ambitions. During these 
years, however, he took advantage of the youth of the king of Scots, 
Malcolm IV., the grandson of David, to compel him to surrender the claims 
on Northumberland and Cumberland which Henry had promised David to 
acknowledge, and to do homage for his earldom of Huntingdon. 

Henry's French wars established the important institution of scutage. 
He could summon the barons and their feudal levies to his banner, but 
their attendance could only be required for a limited period. Hence the 
system was extremely inconvenient for him and also for them. Therefore 
they welcomed a scheme under which they were allowed to commute 
personal service with their levies for a proportionate money payment, to 
which was given the name of " scutage " or shield-money. The scutage 
enabled the king on his side to hire soldiery who were directly in his own 
pay and were, by consequence, exclusively devoted to his interests. On the 
other hand, the barons being virtually released from their feudal obligation 
to maintain forces ready to take the field ceased to do so, with the 
obvious result that they ceased also to be ready to take the field on their 
own account. This commutation had already been practised in respect of 
land held by the Church ; but its extension to the lay baronage immensely 
increased the military power of the Crown. Some twenty years later 
another step in the same direction was taken by the Assize of Arms, which 
reconstituted the national fyrd and regulated the arms which all freeholders, 
burghers, and freemen were required to carry. 

In 1 162 Archbishop Theobald died. The Church, with ample justi- 
fication, had acquired under Stephen many relaxations of its subordination 
to the Crown ; rules established under the Conqueror and under Henry I. 
fell into abeyance. Henry II. was resolved to re-establish the claims of 
the Crown but was willing to wait for Theobald's death. Now it seemed 





EFFIGIES OF HENRY II AND HIS QUEEN EE2ANOR AT FONTREVAULT 
ABBEY, NORMANDY 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 



8 




that his time had come, and he conceived that he had an instrument ready 
to his hand in his chancellor, Thomas Becket, who had hitherto seen eye to 
eye with him. He nominated Thomas to the archbishopric. Becket, as 
chancellor, acted the role of the great minister of the Crown with dramatic zeal 
and enthusiasm ; but he had a different conception of his duties as archbishop. 
He had become the head of the Church ; and in that capacity he was no 
longer the servant of the Crown, but the champion of the Church against 
all comers, resolute to surrender no tittle of her privileges. Since the part 
was thrust upon him he would play it like 
his previous part, with dramatic thorough- 
ness, of which martyrdom would be a 
welcome climax. In the meanwhile the 
brilliant and worldly statesman, the king's 
boon companion, the cleric before whose 
lance knights had been known to go down, 
became the ascetic devotee, the father of 
the poor, the servant of the Lord's servants. 

Now the reforms on which Henry was 
set were twofold. On the one side he 
claimed the recovery for the Crown of 
those rights which it had successfully main- 
tained in the time of the Conqueror and 
Henry I. On the other he demanded the 
curtailment of ecclesiastical powers which 
had grown out of that complete separation of ecclesiastical and temporal 
jurisdictions for which William I. and Lanfranc had been responsible. In 
the chaos of Stephen's reign there had been little hope of obtaining justice 
from any except ecclesiastical courts, which, as a natural consequence, en- 
croached upon the jurisdiction of the lay courts. King Henry found that 
in all cases in which any person was concerned who belonged to the ranks 
of the clergy, including what was practically the lay fringe of that body, 
the Church claimed exclusive jurisdiction, and inflicted on clerics penalties 
which, from the lay point of view, were grotesquely inadequate. Royal 
expostulations were met by archiepiscopal denunciations. The quarrel 
waxed hot. The king was determined that the clergy should not be 
exempted from the due reward of their misdoings. In the Constitutions of 
Clarendon he propounded a scheme which he professed to regard as ex- 
pressing the true customs of the kingdom. Becket was induced to promise 
to accept the customs ; but not without justification he repudiated the 
king's view of what those customs were. 

The clauses in the Constitutions which forbade carrying appeals to 
Rome and required the higher clergy to obtain a royal licence to leave the 
kingdom were hardly disputable. But the case for the " customs " broke 
down when the king claimed that criminous clerks should be handed over 
to the secular arm for further judgment after the Church had inflicted its 



Thomas a Becket arguing with Henry II. 
and King Louis. 



84 NATION MAKING 

own penalties. Becker, however, chose to resist the demand on the ground 
that a cleric as such was exempt from secular punishment i'n virtue of his 
office. The barons took the king's side and threatened violence. Becket 
yielded avowedly to force and nothing else. Having done so he obtained 
a papal dispensation annulling his promise. The king's indignation was 
obvious and justifiable. Becket persuaded himself that his life was in 
danger, as it really may have been ; and he fled from the country to appeal 
to the Pope and the king of France. 

In the course of the quarrel both sides had committed palpable breaches 
of the law. Now, with Becket out of the country, diplomacy at Rome, 
coupled with the logic of facts in England, might have secured the king a 
complete victory ; but he was tempted to a blunder. He had his eldest 
son Henry crowned as his successor. Coronation was a prerogative of the 

FOUR GENERATIONS OF PLANTAGENETS 

He?iry II. , 1154. 



Henry. 



Richard I. , 
Cceur de Lion, 



Geoffrey of Brittany. 

I 
Arthur. 



John, 1 199. 



I 
Henry III., 121 6. 



Edward I. , 
1272. 



Edmund 
Crouchback 
of Lancaster. 



Richard of Cornwall. 



Margaret, 

m. 

Alexander III. 



Henry of 
Almain. 



Joan, m. 

Alexander II. of 

Scotland. 



Edmund of 
Cornwall. 



Elinor, m. 
Simon de 
Montfort. 



Alexander III., 

m. Margaret, da. 

of Henry III. 



Archbishop of Canterbury ; the young prince was crowned without him. 
The Pope threatened to suspend the bishops who had performed the 
ceremony and to lay the king's continental territories under an interdict. 
Henry was alarmed and sought a reconciliation with Becket. At a formal 
meeting in France the quarrel was so far composed that Becket was invited 
to return in peace to Canterbury. 

He returned, but not in peace. He had hardly landed in England 
when he excommunicated the bishops who had participated in the corona- 
tion ceremony. The news was carried to the king, who was then in the 
neighbourhood of Bayeux. He burst into a fit of ungovernable rage. 
Four knights caught at the words which he uttered in his frenzy, slipped 
from the court, posted to the sea, and took ship for England, where they at 
once made for Canterbury. They broke into the archbishop's house and 
charged him with treason. He flung the charge in their teeth. They 
withdrew, but only to arm themselves. The archbishop's chaplains forced 
him into the cathedral where the vesper service was beginning. As he 
passed up into the choir the knights burst in with drawn swords crying, 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 85 

" Where is the traitor ? where is the archbishop." He turned and advanced 
to meet them. " I," he said, " am the servant of Christ whom ye seek." 
One cf them laid hands on him ; the archbishop flung him off with words 
of scorn. They cut him down and scattered his brains on the pavement. 
Then they took horse and departed. 

The murder of Becket gave him the victory which otherwise would 
hardly have been his. Henry's repentance was abject and sincere. Nearly 
eighteen months passed before he finally came to terms with the Pope; he 
evaded the extremity of submission, making a pretext for delay out of the 
expedition to Ireland, of which we shall presently speak further. When he 
did come to terms he was able to maintain those claims for the independence 




Mounted soldiers of the time of Henry II. 

[From a Vulgate Bible at Winchester.] 



of the English Crown which had been asserted by his predecessors. But 
he had to surrender on the question of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical 
courts ; and no encroachment was made upon those privileges called 
" Benefit of Clergy " until the dawn of the Reformation. 

The story of the later years of Henry's reign is very much taken up 
with his quarrels with his sons, the details of which scarcely concern our 
history. But how effectively the king had organised the royal power we 
can see by the fact that for nearly twenty years after his accession there 
was no revolt. And then when of a sudden his enemies rose up against 
him on' all sides — his sons, his foes on the continent, English barons, and 
the king of Scots — he turned to bay, stamped out rebellion, routed his 
external enemies, took the king of Scots prisoner, and extorted from him 
by the treaty of Falaise the one unqualified and unquestionable submission 
of the northern kingdom which history records. 



86 NATION MAKING 

Henry's victory in this first contest was shortly followed by the Assize 
of Northampton, which gave a final shape to the system of sending justices 
on circuit which had first been instituted by Henry I. Two years later, in 
1 1 7 8, another step was taken in the organisation of the judicial system by the 
appointment of a special committee of the Curia Regis to deal with the bulk 

of the questions which normally came before 
that body. At a later date this committee, 
now known as the Curia Regis in Banco, 
developed into the two Courts of King's 
Bench and Common Pleas. The final court 
of appeal, however, continued to be that of 
the king sitting in council. 

In 1 1 83 family quarrels again broke out, 
in which the three elder sons fought against 
each other and occasionally combined in 
order to fight their father. In this year, 
however, died the eldest son Henry, thus 
leaving the second, Richard, who was already 
Duke of Aquitaine, heir to the English throne. 
Three years later died the third son, Geoffrey, 
on whom Brittany had been bestowed, to 
whom after his death was born that son 
Arthur, of whose tragic fate the tradition, if 
not the actual facts, are preserved in Shake- 
speare's play, King John. Quarrels between 
King Henry and Richard were sedulously 
fomented by the crafty and utterly un- 
scrupulous young king of France, Philip II., 
called Augustus. A check was put upon them, 
however, by a sudden blow which fell upon 
Christendom. 

For eighty years the Christians had held 
Jerusalem and the sacred places in Palestine, 
which had been torn from the Saracens in 
the first crusade. But a new leader of 
aggressive Mohammedanism arose in the 
person of the Seljuk Turk Sala-ud-Din, the famous " Sultan Saladin." He 
fell upon the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the Holy 
City itself. All Western Christendom began to arm for a mighty crusade, 
and in the horror of that great disaster all other feuds were for the 
time compounded. The preparations for the crusade led in England 
for the first time to the imposition of a tax not upon land, but upon 
movables or personal property, known as the Saladin Tithe. The tax 
was sanctioned by the Great Council ; and it is to be observed that 
although the individual gave in his own sworn return of the value of his 




Knights of the late 12th century. 




THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 87 

property, his assessment might be appealed against to a jury of his own 
parish. 

Henry probably and Richard certainly were both sincere in their crusad- 
ing zeal. But Richard's policy was always ruined by the personal passions 
and jealousies of the moment, which Philip of France always turned to his 
own account. Richard involved himself in a quarrel with the Count of 
Toulouse ; Philip joined in against him, and Henry himself was dragged in. 
Then Philip and Richard became reconciled and turned on the old king. 
How and why Henry broke 
down it is hard to guess ; but 
break down he did, both in 
body and mind. He had 
no heart to fight, and sub- 
mitted, conceding everything 
that was demanded of him, 
including the pardon of all 
who had joined the conspiracy. 
The last blow fell when he 
opened the list of traitors and 
found it headed by the name 
of his youngest and favourite 
son John. The shock killed 
him. Richard, passionate in 
his remorse as~in his anger, came to view his father's corpse ; and men said 
that blood trickled from the dead man's nostrils, a sign that he who stood 
by him was his murderer. 

The tragedy and failures of Henry's last months do not touch the fact 
that in England he raised the crown to the highest point that it ever reached. 
When he came to the throne the one absolute necessity was the concentra- 
tion of power in the central government, which meant and could mean only 
in the king's hands. There was no independent political organisation of the 
people ; while of the greater barons each one was a law to himself. They 
had not learnt to stand together as champions of public law. But they were 
not unwilling to receive from the king the conception of public law which 
was afterwards to be^tr fruit. The new powers of the Crown prepared the 
way for the tyranny of John ; but Henry's own methods implanted in the 
barons that conception of public spirit which was exemplified at Runnymede 
and culminated in Simon de Montfort. 

The most marked of the royal innovations was to be found in the 
extension of taxation in the form of exactions for war purposes called 
" scutage " in the case of tenants-in-chief, and " gifts," " aids," or " tall- 
ages " when levied from shires and towns. The Crown was further 
strengthened when the king made almost a clean sweep of the sheriffs, and 
for local magnates substituted exchequer officials in that office — an adminis- 
trative reform of great importance. We have already noted how the dis- 



Ladies of the I2th century weaving. 
[From Ead wine's Psalter.] 



88 NATION MAKING 

integrating character which attended continental feudalism was checked 
by the institution of scutage and the more thorough organisation of the 
national militia by the Assize of Arms, which also extended the obligation 
of military service to classes which had hitherto been exempt. 

In the field of judicature we have noted the reorganisation of the Curia 
Regis itself and the revival of Henry's system of occasionally sending visiting 
justices to inspect and supervise judicial administration in the provinces. 
This system also was reorganised by the Assizes of Northampton and 
Clarendon, which sent justices regularly on circuit and reserved for their 
judgment whole classes of cases which had hitherto been dealt with by 
local courts, although in the main questions of guilt or innocence were 
settled by the preliminary inquiry. That is, no one was presented for trial 
who had been acquitted in preliminary investigation ; and the fact of pre- 
sentation was treated as prima facie evidence of guilt. The itinerant justices 
were the representatives of the Crown. Thus by his various reforms Henry 
concentrated in the hands of the Crown and of officers dependent on the 
favour of the Crown the control of finance, the control of the military 
forces, and the control of judicial administration. When the Crown abused 
its powers it became the turn of the barons to insist that those powers 
should be exercised, not arbitrarily, but in accordance with precedent and 
custom. But those powers were so great that they could not be set at 
defiance or even challenged at all by individuals, or capriciously even by 
groups of individuals, but only by the concerted action of men moved by a 
strong sense of loyalty to a common cause. 



II 

THE ANNEXATION OF IRELAND 

Henry II. won, as we have seen, from the Scots king a complete sub- 
mission and an acknowledgment of his suzerainty over the kingdom of 
Scotland. This, however, was to be immediately abrogated by Henry's 
successor. On the other hand, he made a permanent acquisition by the 
annexation of Ireland, which hitherto had stood outside the region of 
English affairs, though it had influenced the early history of Scotland. 

The Romans came and passed but never set foot on the sister island. 
The English came and made themselves masters of Britain, save for the 
highlands of the west, from the Channel to the Forth, the " Scots water." 
And they also left Ireland alone. The Irish Celts continued their Celtic 
development untouched by the Latin or the Teuton. They sent out those 
tribes which occupied Argyle, and ultimately gave their name to the Scottish 
nation. They sent out the missionaries who taught Christianity to the wild 
peoples of the North, and seemed likely enough at one stage to capture all 
England for their Church. But Celtic tribalism never adapted itself to the 







THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 89 

evolution of an advanced political State. The subordination of the parts 
for the sake of the whole was alien to the Celtic temperament ; and the 
progress which followed upon the stirrings of religious enthusiasm ended 
when the motive impulse died down. Ireland continued to be peopled by 
clansmen personally devoted to their petty chiefs, but under no common 
government. Powerful chiefs exercised some dominion over numerous 
minor chiefs, and some sort of nominal supremacy over the whole island 
on the part of the chief of the O'Neills seems commonly to have 
been recognised by these lesser kings. 

But Ireland was no more immune 
from the attacks of the Northmen 
than the rest of Western Europe. 
Danes so-called, and probably many 
more Norwegians than Danes, harried 
her coasts and planted settlements 
from Dublin to Waterford — settle- 
ments which were made the occa- 
sional base for attacks upon England. 
But these Danes made no great 
effort to effect a conquest ; the 
Danish host never flung itself in force 
upon Ireland as it did upon England 
and France. According to tradition 

a Norse conquest was attempted early in the eleventh century, when the 
invaders were overwhelmed at the great battle of Clontarf by the Irish 
hero, Brian Boroimhe, in 1014. This, however, was precisely the time 
when Denmark was conquering England, and no aggressive national move- 
ment was taking place from Norway. The Danes or Norsemen who were 
overthrown by Brian Boroimhe were no great host of invaders from over- 
sea, but probably the folk from the Danish settlements on the coast, though 
reinforced no doubt by bands of miscellaneous sea-rovers. 

However, the battle of Clontarf put an end finally to active aggression 
on the part of Danes or Norsemen. Ireland was not included in Knut's 
conception of a northern empire. Seventy years later it appears that 
William the Conqueror contemplated the annexation of Ireland, of which 
doubtless also William Rufus also dreamed. The English Chronicler says 
that the Conqueror, had he lived two years longer, " would have subjugated 
Ireland by his wisdom without war." But his plans remain unrevealed and 
never materialised in action. Whatever Rufus may have intended, his 
ambitions were cut short by Walter Tyrell's arrow in the New Forest. 

Nevertheless, if Brian Boroimhe delivered Ireland from the Scandinavian 
conqueror, he did not succeed in organising an Irish state. Ireland re- 
mained unconsolidated, a congeries of clans engaged on interminable feuds, 
and of petty kings engaged on interminable rivalries ; politically and 
ecclesiastically as well as geographically outside the influences which were 



An Irish chalice of the ioth to nth centuries. 

[In silver exquisitely ornamented with gold repousse and 
filigree work.] 



9 o NATION MAKING 

shaking western Christendom; un-Teutonised, un-Latinised, and, from the 
papal point of view, heretical and hardly better than pagan. 

Towards this region Henry Plantagenet turned an occasional glance, 
as one which it might some day be worth while to conquer if he should 
find time. Very early in his reign he obtained from Pope Adrian IV., the 
one Englishman who has ever occupied the papal throne, an authorisation 
to bring Ireland under his dominion and into ecclesiastical obedience to 
Rome. Other matters were of more immediate importance to the king ; 
but an opportunity presented itself for establishing his authority in Ireland 
without undertaking a war to that end. Dermot, King of Leinster, was 
desperately at feud with a neighbour. Deposed from his kingdom, he 
appealed for aid to the mighty monarch on the other side of St. George's 
Channel. Henry would not take up the quarrel himself, but he allowed 
a group of Norman adventurers to make what they could out of the situa- 
tion, always on condition of their remaining his own liege subjects and 
doing homage to him for any new territories they might acquire. The 
chief of the adventurers was Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, called 
Strongbow, a baron whose acres did not suffice to make him wealthy or 
powerful at home in spite of remarkable abilities. With him were 
associated sundry Fitzgeralds, De Burghs, Fitzurses and others. They 
went over to the aid of Dermot with forces which were not indeed large, 
but were incomparably better equipped than the half-armed levies of the 
Irish clans, whom they routed with ease. Dermot was reinstated in his 
kingdom ; Strongbow married his daughter, and was endowed with wide 
estates and the reversion of Leinster. The rest of the Normans had their share. 

But Henry of England had no intention of permitting his own barons to 
set up independent principalities in the neighbourhood of his own kingdom. 
He was minded to make his own profit out of their adventure; moreover, 
the murder of Becket made it particularly convenient for him at that 
moment to place himself out of reach of rapid communication with Rome. 
So in 1 171 he proceeded to Ireland with a considerable force. Whatever 
ambitious projects Strongbow may have entertained, he had no thought of 
defying the king of England, who came, moreover, armed with the papal 
authority which conferred upon him the dignity of Lord of Ireland. 
Strongbow was well enough content to retain the ample estates of Leinster 
as Henry's vassal and to surrender the royal title. 

There was no united Ireland to bid defiance to the invader ; and most 
of the Irish chiefs had no particular objection to acknowledging the over- 
lordship of the king of England, such acknowledgments being in theii 
experience easily made and easily set aside. All that Henry wanted was a 
general submission on their part and a secure foothold for himself in case 
he should afterwards find it convenient to turn it to account. There was 
no such prospect of immediate profit as would tempt him to expend time, 
labour, and money on the organisation of the newly acquired kingdom. 
Policy however, demanded insistence on the ecclesiastical side of his old 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 91 

bargain with Adrian IV. in order to conciliate the present Pope Alexander 
III. The Churchmen in Ireland saw better hope for the future in the 
prospect of a government organised on the English model than in the 
prevalent lawlessness. They may perhaps be forgiven if they acted on 
expectations which were unfulfilled. Their unorthodoxy was not deeply 
rooted ; they accepted the Roman supremacy and ranked themselves on 
the side of the annexation. 

Henry then did not conquer Ireland in the sense in which William I. 
conquered England, or even in the sense in which William would have 
conquered England had there been no insurrections after his coronation. 
It was rather as though William had merely established a few of his followers 
with a couple of earldoms and several minor baronies carved out of Wessex, 
and had then left the country to take care of itself under the nominal 
control of one justiciar. Practically this was what Henry did in Ireland. 
He placed Hugh de Lacey in Dublin as justiciar, and gave him the great 
earldom of Meath to counterbalance Strongbow's earldom of Leinster. A 
few Normans held scattered territories, while the bulk of the Irish chiefs 
retained their land as feudatories of the English king. The English law 
ran only in the regions from Waterford to Dublin known as the English 
Pale. Henry, in fact, was quite as anxious to ensure that the Norman barons 
in Ireland should not become too powerful as to establish over the whole 
country a control which would have been costly and unremunerative. It 
was indeed hisjntention, at the time of the conquest of Ireland, to part his 
great dominion among his four sons ; and probably when he annexed 
Ireland he had the idea of making it the portion for the youngest of them, 
John, who had come into the world ten years after his elder brothers and 
could otherwise only be provided for by slices out of their territory. But the 
fact remains that his organisation of a government for Ireland never went 
beyond the initial stages ; and when twelve years later John did actually 
visit Ireland, his behaviour went very near to driving the native chiefs into 
a general insurrection. In short, the official government exercised only a 
very inefficient control within the Pale and none at all outside it ; while 
the Norman barons made fresh acquisitions of territory for themselves and, 
like the Danes before them, adapted themselves to the native manners and 
customs ; and the Fitzurses, by translating their name into its Celtic equiva- 
lent M'Mahon, exemplified the general truth that they had become in spirit 
much more Irish than Norman. 

Ill 

CCEUR DE LION 

Richard I. is one of the magnificently picturesque figures of our history, 
the incarnation of all that most appeals to the imagination in feudalism. He 
is the fiery soldier dominated by the great ideal of winning back the Holy 



9 2 NATION MAKING 

Sepulchre from the Paynim ; he is the knight of unmatched prowess before 
whose terrific onset the Saracens are scattered like chaff ; he is the hero 
so fearless and so mighty that it was fabled concerning him that he slew 
a lion with his hands ; he is the minstrel king, rescued from durance vile 
by the faithful persistence of his loyal follower, Blondell ; he is the genial 
monarch who exchanged buffets with Robin Hood and Friar Tuck in merry 
Sherwood ; he is the generous prince, too chivalrous to punish the traitorous 

brother whom he freely forgave ; who, 
dying, freely pardoned the man who had 
dealt him his death-blow. Fact and fable 
are largely mingled in the picture. But as 
far as concerns the history of England 
Richard's personality belongs chiefly to 
romance. Out of his whole reign of ten 
years he spent barely six months, all told, 
in England. His crusading exploits form 
no part of English history ; the political 
aims on which he was engaged in his 
latter years belong to his position as a 
continental potentate, not as king of Eng- 
land. His reign had, indeed, a constitutional 
importance not very easily grasped and very 
easily forgotten in the glamour of romance 
which attaches to him ; but this was owing, 
not to Richard, but to the ministers to 
whom he entrusted his kingdom during 
his absence. 

Although there was practically no estab- 
lished law of succession, Richard's title to 
the crown was unchallenged when Henry II. 
died. From August to December, 1189, 
he was in England, engaged in prepara- 
tions for the crusade. His great need was money, which he raised with 
unparalleled recklessness by selling everything he had the power to 
sell for which he could get a price. For a price he set William the 
Lion of Scotland free from the obligations of the treaty of Falaise, and 
cancelled all English claims which rested upon that transaction. He sold 
a share in the chief justiciarship to the Bishop of Durham ; he sold 
sheriffdoms right and left ; he sold charters to the towns ; he sold 
offices and honours ; he sold permission to resign offices and honours. 
Then he departed, and England did not see his face again till the spring 
of 1194. 

He left behind him as chancellor and chief justiciar — the Bishop of 
Durham was soon superseded — a low-born Norman, William Longchamp, 
who had the one supreme merit of being loyal to his master. His brother 




An English monarch about 11 90. 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 93 

John and his illegitimate brother Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, were 
under oath to remain outside the kingdom for two years. Longchamp, 
who was generally detested as an upstart, and displayed all an upstart's 
vices, started on a policy of repressing the nobles by re-occupying the 
royal castles which had been left in their hands in consideration of substantial 
payments. But Prince John had been allowed to return to the country, 
and now sought to pose as the champion of liberty against the justiciar's 
oppression. Richard, whose progress to Palestine was delayed in Sicily 
till the spring of 1191, received warnings which led to the appointment 
of the trustworthy and capable Walter of Coutances as justiciar in the room 
of Longchamp. 

John plotted to obtain supreme power for himself, with the connivance 
of Philip of France, who had returned from Palestine a few weeks after 
Richard's arrival there. In the autumn of 119 2 Richard himself started on 
his return journey ; but he was shipwrecked on the Adriatic coast, captured 
by his personal foe, Leopold of Austria, and handed over to the clutches 
of the German Emperor Henry, who held him in captivity. An enormous 
ransom was demanded, and the conspirators, Philip and John, spent the 
year 11 93 in intrigues to prevent Richard's liberation. But Walter of 
Coutances and his successor in the justiciarship, Hubert Walter, Archbishop 
of Canterbury, aided by the old queen-mother Eleanor, succeeded in raising 
the huge ransom ; and the conspirators were checkmated by Richard's own 
arrival in England in March 1194. Rebellion collapsed and the rebels met 
with undeservedly generous treatment. Richard's exploits had secured him 
a popularity in England, which was evidenced by the readiness with which 
the nation had submitted to fearfully heavy taxation in order to set him free ; 
and which was not destroyed even by the new taxation imposed for carrying 
out Richard's vengeful designs against his arch-enemy, Philip of France. 
Within two months Richard had again departed from England, never to 
return, leaving the government in the hands of Hubert Walter, who ruled 
the country for four years. 

Richard's wars and diplomatic intrigues concern England mainly 
because of the heavy demands for taxation and for military service which 
they entailed. The latter brought about what may be called a constitutional 
alliance of the greater, barons and the higher clergy, which foreshadowed 
the events of the coming century. Headed by Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, 
they declared that their feudal obligation did not extend to service beyond 
the seas. And this Constitutional Opposition carried its point. Hubert 
thereupon resigned his position, and Geoffrey FitzPeter, Earl of Essex, 
took his place. 

But' the fundamental importance of Walter's term of office lies in his 
development of the system of representation and election for the purposes 
of local government, which afterwards provided the machinery for a repre- 
sentative parliament. The archbishop, it may be taken for granted, was 
not looking forward to any such development ; probably he was concerned 



94 NATION MAKING 

only with administrative convenience. But the changes he made also had 
the political effect of adding greatly to the importance of the class which 
grew into the gentry of the country, the " knights of the shire," who were for 
the most part tenants-in-chief holding from the Crown. Men of greater 
estate than the small freeholders, there was no class in the community 
whose interests were more bound up with the maintenance of peace and 
the enforcement of law. Hitherto the local "juries" had been bodies 
selected by the sheriff ; it was their function to lay sworn information 
before the Crown officials in connection with assessments for taxation and 
for fiscal purposes, and to present cases for trial at the grand assizes. 
Walter substituted for this arrangement the election in the shire court of 
four officers called Coroners, who decided which cases should be reserved 
to be presented for trial by the judges ; and the selection of the juries, 
instead of being left to the sheriffs, was placed in the hands of four knights 
of the shire elected for that purpose in the shire courts. Thus the way 
was prepared for sending elected knights of the shire to attend the Great 
Council, the name now clearly appropriated to the National Assembly, at 
which all tenants-in-chief were entitled to be present. Incidentally also 
knights of the shire were appointed " custodians of the peace," which 
meant primarily that they controlled the fi Hue and Cry," which may be 
described as the local machinery for police purposes, out of which again 
at a later stage developed the functions of justices of the peace. 

In 1199 Richard received his death wound while besieging the fortress 
of a recalcitrant vassal, the Viscount of Limoges, and was succeeded by 
his brother John. 



IV 

JOHN 

There was another claimant to the throne in the person of the twelve year 
old Arthur of Brittany, the posthumous son of Geoffrey, a brother who had 
come between Richard and John. Both England and Normandy, not with- 
out hesitation, acknowledged John's claim ; and in England he was formally 
elected. Hubert Walter became chancellor, and while he lived co-operated 
with the justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter. But Arthur's mother, Constance, 
claimed for him Anjou and Maine, as well as Brittany, encouraged by Philip 
of France. Aquitaine in the meantime indubitably belonged to the old queen- 
mother Eleanor, whose marriage with Henry II. while he was still only Count 
of Anjou had associated it with the Angevin dominion. John stirred up a 
host of enemies by divorcing his wife Isabella of Gloucester, whose name 
is commonly given as Hadwisa, on a plea of consanguinity, and marrying 
another Isabel, of Angouleme, in spite of her being betrothed to Hugo of 
Lusignan. Out of these embroilments Philip of France meant to get his 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 95 

own advantage by giving his support wherever there was most to be gained, 
though always professedly acting in accordance with feudal law. 

The Lusignans formed a party ; revolts spread among John's French 
vassals of various sorts ; Philip intervened as suzerain and mediator ; trickery 
was answered by trickery ; and when Philip thought himself strong enough 
he summoned John to appear before him to answer charges brought against 
him in his capacity as Duke of Aquitaine. John refused to appear and 
Philip declared his fiefs 
forfeited. Normandy 
Philip meant to keep for 
himself ; for the rest of 
the Angevin dominion he 
recognised the rights of 
Arthur. Arthur attacked 
Aquitaine and besieged 
the queen mother. For 
once John exerted the 
military ability which he 
really possessed, swooped 
upon Arthur by a bril- 
liantly rapid march, and 
captured him with all 
his company. He had 
the game in his own 
hands, and lost it by 
murdering Arthur as 
every one believed, and 
treating others of his 
captives with a brutality 
which alienated numbers 
who would otherwise 
have supported him. 
Philip flung himself 
against Normandy, and 
John's English barons refused to fight for him. By the midsummer of 
1204 Normandy was irrevocably lost. By the end of the year Gascony, 
which was bound to England by trade interests, was all that was left to 
John of the Angevin inheritance except a part of Poitou. 

While John was losing Normandy and most of his other territories, 
matters went tolerably smoothly in England itself under the government of 
Geoffrey FitzPeter and Hubert Walter. John insisted upon exactions which 
w T ere excessive and of doubtful legality. But the justiciar made politic con- 
cessions, sometimes to powerful barons, sometimes to a section of the clergy, 
and sometimes to the towns. The charters and trading rights granted to 
the last served for a long time to keep them royalist, when the baronage had 




96 NATION MAKING 

already been goaded into an attitude of open opposition to the Crown. The 
obstinate refusal of the baronage to follow John from France made the 
success of his cause impossible there, though probably in any case he would 
have compassed his own ruin. 

In 1205 the death of Hubert Walter opened the second phase of King 
John's reign, the struggle with the papacy. For John it was unfortunate 
that the most powerful and the most uncompromising of all the Popes, 
Innocent III., now occupied the papal throne. The king's nominee for the 
archbishopric vacated by Hubert Walter's death was John de Grey, Bishop 
of Lincoln. The actual right of election lay with the Chapter of Canter- 
bury ; but the bishops of the province had in practice claimed to participate, 
and the king had in practice an effective power of control. The Chapter 
did not want John de Grey, but some of them at least would have preferred 
to avoid a quarrel with the king and the bishops. A hot-headed section, 
however, held a secret and irregular election, chose their sub-prior, and 
hurried him off to Rome to obtain papal confirmation of the election. The 
facts leaked out while he was on his journey. The other party in the 
Chapter hastened to make their peace with the king by electing John de Grey 
in conjunction with the bishops. De Grey went off to Rome to procure his 
own confirmation. Innocent took the view that both the elections were 
highly irregular, and he invited the king to send to Rome a commission of 
the Canterbury Chapter with authority to make a new election. When the 
commission arrived, Innocent, having set aside the two previous elections, 
invited them to adopt a nominee of his own, Cardinal Stephen Langton. 
The commission obeyed ; and now every one concerned except Stephen 
Langton himself, including the Pope, had behaved irregularly, though there 
was no question of Langton's fitness for the office, and Innocent had believed 
that the appointment would be acceptable to the king. 

John wanted his own creature and flung defiance at the Pope ; the 
Pope retorted by taking the high ground of his supreme authority as the 
successor of St. Peter. John seized the Canterbury estates, and the 
monks withdrew or were driven into exile. The Pope threatened an 
interdict. John offered submission with a saving clause ; Innocent would 
listen to no saving clause. John proclaimed that if the interdict were 
issued he would forfeit the estates of every ecclesiastic who obeyed it. 
Innocent pronounced the interdict, and the clergy obeyed it. Practically 
the king and the king's officers on the one side declared war on the clergy, 
while the clergy on the other side closed the churches. 

The populace seem to have accepted the situation with a surprising 
equanimity. , On the whole they inclined to the king's side, probably because, 
when the ecclesiastical revenues were seized, they were themselves 
delivered from the excessive burden of taxation. But John was threatened 
with excommunication, which would give every one who wanted it the 
papal authority for repudiating allegiance to him. At the end of 1209 
John was excommunicated, and the excommunication was followed by 




THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 97 

the threat of inviting Philip of France to effect his deposition. John 
continued to be defiant ; but discontent increased, the air grew thick 
with p]ots and rumours of plots ; John could trust no one and sus- 
pected all ; Philip was preparing for invasion ; and John, at last in sudden 
terror lest he should find himself deserted and alone, resolved on sub- 
mission. In May 12 13 he admitted the papal legate Pandulph, and 
made the famous submission in which he surrendered the crown of 
England and received back the kingdom as a fief of Holy Church. Thence- 
forth John was the 
Pope's repentant son 
and very obedient ser- 
vant, and Innocent was 
John's very good lord 
and father. The sub- 
mission does not ap- 
pear at the time to 
have shocked public 
opinion to any great 
extent ; John was by 
no means alone among 
the European princes 
who received their 
crowns as vassals of 
the Holy See. ~ And 
John's foes were deprived of the papal sanction for attacking him. 

Stephen Langton, now accepted as Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
Geoffrey FitzPeter, were anxious to turn the new situation to account by 
efforts to restore the kingdom to its normal condition, and to remedy the 
abuses which had increased and multiplied while the quarrel with the 
papacy was in progress. But John had other views. Philip of France 
had protested loudly that he would not give up at the Pope's dictation the 
project of deposing John in. favour of his own son, which he had taken in 
hand by the Pope's desire. But immediately after the reconciliation an 
English fleet had fallen upon the French ships, destroyed large numbers 
of them, and captured some hundreds with quantities of stores. For 
anything like invasion Philip was temporarily paralysed. Nevertheless, 
John's first desire was to pursue a vindictive policy. Continental powers, 
including the Emperor Otto, were ready to join in an alliance for the 
overthrow of the French king. 

The English baronage, however, would have nothing to say to a 
renewal of the French war. They mistrusted John as a soldier ; they 
knew that he had before collected vast sums of money, ostensibly for 
military purposes,, which were thrown away in extravagance and mis- 
management. John raged, but in the face of their stolidity he was 
helpless. Resolved to vent his wrath upon some one, he started for the 

G 



A translation of holy relics in the 13th century. 
[Drawn by Matthew Paris.] 



98 NATION MAKING 

North, intending to exact penalties from the northern barons for their 
recalcitrance. Stephen Langton followed him, with threats even of 
renewing the excommunication if he persisted. An assembly was called 
at St. Albans by Geoffrey FitzPeter, where the proposal was perhaps made 
that the charter of Henry I. should be laid before John for ratification. 
Constitutional resistance to unconstitutional action was taking shape. 
And then the old justiciar, who, like Hubert Walter, had in some sense 
stood between the Crown and the barons, died. Both those men had 
been loyal supporters of the Crown, but had exercised a restraining 
influence on John himself while endeavouring to conciliate the interests 
which it was most dangerous to outrage. 

John had rejoiced in the death of Walter and rejoiced now in the death 
of FitzPeter. The Pope, who had been ready to depose a disobedient king, 
was equally ready to condemn disobedience to his repentant vassal. But 
Innocent himself had presented England with an archbishop who feared 
neither king nor pope when he saw before him the clear path of justice. 
If the baronage produced no conspicuously competent leader, the Church 
gave them in Stephen Langton a guide as courageous as he was wise. It 
was Langton who produced and set before them the actual charter of 
Henry I., and gave them the controlling principle that they should demand 
not innovations, but the observance of the laws which the people and the 
great rulers of the past had recognised as just and righteous. The strength 
of the barons in the coming contest lay in the fact that it was made one not 
on behalf of the privileges of a class, but on behalf of the supremacy of 
the law. 

Still John was bent on his project of destroying Philip of France, in 
conjunction with the Emperor Otto and other enemies of the French king. 
Unable to raise the feudal levies, John collected a large force of mercenaries 
and sailed for Poitou. He made terms with his old enemies of the house 
of Lusignan, and reports came home of a series of successful operations. 
But Otto on the east did not strike, and Philip organised his defence. At 
last Otto did move, in conjunction with a considerable force of John's 
troops which were in the Low Countries under the command of William 
Longsword, Earl of Salisbury. Then came complete disaster. At the battle 
of Bouvines Philip put Otto utterly to rout, taking the Earl of Salisbury 
prisoner ; and his victory entirely dissolved the alliance which had been 
formed against him. Pope Innocent succeeded in procuring a peace which 
still left Gascony and Guienne to the king of England ; but John returned 
to his kingdom, not with the palm of victory as he had hoped, but under 
the stigma of defeat and disgrace. 

Characteristically enough John wished to relieve his feelings at the 
expense of the barons ; but Bouvines only served to stiffen them. The 
leaders entered into a solemn compact to insist on the demand for the 
confirmation of Henry I.'s charter. In January 12 15 they appeared before 
John in arms and made their demand. John procured three months' delay, 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 99 

and in the interval employed every device of which he was master to break 

up the opposition ; on his behalf, too, Innocent thundered from Rome. 

But it was in vain. The barons collected a great army in the North and 

once more sent in their statement of grievances. John flew into a passion, 

declaring with many oaths that they had better have asked him for his 

kingdom at once. They had awaited his reply ; now they marched south 

to London, while John retreated towards the west. London received the 

barons with open arms ; no one gathered to the king's support. He saw 

that he was beaten, and 

placed himself in the 

hands of the archbishop. 

The Great Charter, based 

upon that of Henry I., 

was drawn up, placed 

before him, and received 

the royal seal on June 17, 

1 215, at Runnymede, near 

Windsor. 

The fundamental 
quality of all political re- 
volutions that have taken 
place in England has been 
a theoretical conservatism. 
From the Charter to the 
Parliament Bill of 191 1 the reformers have invariably taken their stand 
on the doctrine that they were insisting on fundamental principles of the 
constitution against unconstitutional innovation. The only exceptions are 
to be found in the divers forms of republic which were attempted between 
1648 and 1660 ; since it was not possible to maintain that England had 
ever before been a republic. In no case has the doctrine been more com- 
pletely warranted than in that of the Great Charter, "the Charter" par 
excellence. With the exception of a single point, every line of it insists upon 
principles either explicitly formulated in previous charters or implicitly 
sanctioned by them — principles which had been set aside only in times of 
sheer lawlessness or by the deliberate innovations of the Plantagenets. Its 
novelty lay in the fact that it was extorted from the king at the sword's 
point instead of being voluntarily conceded by him. In the charter itself 
the main variation from precedent lay in its explicit formulation of principles 
which hitherto had only been implied. But it was precisely that change 
which established it as a permanent criterion. 

It laid down that no man should be brought to trial unless evidence 
could be produced against him ; that no man should be punished except 
after lawful trial, or in a manner disproportionate to his defence ; that 
justice should not be sold nor delayed nor denied to any man. It 
claimed also that only recognised taxes and feudal fees (though these are 




West Dean Parsonage, Sussex, a 13th century building. 



ioo NATION MAKING 

somewhat inadequately denned) might be levied without obtaining the 
formal consent of the Great Council. There was ample ground for declar- 
ing that every one of these principles had been observed by the great rulers 
of the past. When the Charter comes to details the remarkable fact is 
that the barons did not confine themselves to insistence on the privileges of 
their own order, but also bound themselves to observe the just rights of 
other sections of the community in accordance with the law. Not that they 
wished to improve the position of the humbler classes or pretended to be 
champions of democracy ; but they stood for the Supremacy of Law, and 
the right of every man to be in practice secure of what the law promised 
him in theory. 

The one innovation of the Charter was the machinery which it set up 
for compelling the Crown to carry out its obligations. It created a com- 
mittee of twenty-five, nominated from among the Greater Barons with the 
addition of the Mayor of London, which should have authority to enforce 
the Charter in arms even against the king. That innovation was the one 
feature of the Charter in which there was no permanence, although it was 
followed as a precedent at various crises during the next two hundred 
years. 

The Charter marks an epoch in English history ; it set up a permanent 
formula of liberties to which appeal could for ever after be made. But it 
did not bring immediate peace and good government. There were numbers 
of the barons who wanted something very much more drastic than what 
the wisdom and moderation of Stephen Langton sought to procure. For a 
short time it seemed that the king meant to fulfil his promises ; but insub- 
ordination among the barons provided him with an excuse for making 
preparations to repudiate the Charter. He procured from the Pope a 
decree which annulled it ; the more readily, because Innocent wanted John 
to take a leading part in a new Crusade, which under the existing conditions 
was impossible. Langton himself was paralysed by a papal threat to 
suspend him from his office. By the autumn both sides were preparing 
for war ; and before the end of the year the barons, or a majority of them, 
took the extreme step of inviting the French Dauphin Louis to come to 
their aid. The barons suffered from the want of any strong and capable 
leader, and the coming of a French force identified patriotism with the 
Royalist cause. At first, indeed, the king gained few supporters, and none 
from among the baronage. Though Dover held out for him stoutly under 
the Justiciar Hubert de Burgh, it seemed at the outset as though Louis 
would carry matters all his own way. But time was on the side of a 
reaction, and the barons began to perceive with wrath that Louis's French 
followers expected to reap their own harvest, while the Committee of 
twenty-five were almost ignored by him. John occupied Lincoln, and 
already there were signs of the tide turning, when the king was seized 
with a sudden illness and died at Newark on October 19, 1216. 

John deservedly enjoys the reputation of the worst monarch who ever 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 101 

occupied the English throne, with no one to challenge that unenviable 
primacy except possibly .^Ethelred the Redeless. But John's very crimes 
and failures wrought good for the country. The recklessness of his rule, 
his utter disregard of law, his violence towards the Church, his extrava- 
gance, his monstrous taxation, and his personal wickedness, drove the 
baronage to assume the attitude of champions of law and order, and to 
wring from him the Charter to which appeal could for ever after be made 
when the ruling powers set law and order at nought. He shattered the 
Angevin dominion, but by so doing he made England English. The fusion 
of English and Normans had made great progress even in the reign of 
Henry II. ; but the loss of Normandy finally deprived the Norman families 
in England of their interest in Normandy, and bound them to England ; so 
that in the next reign they looked upon themselves as English, and upon 
Frenchmen, wherever they came from, as aliens and foreigners. Hence 
the national development of England was greatly indebted to the loss of 
John's possession in Northern France. Henceforth no king of England 
could treat the kingdom, after the manner of Richard I., as secondary to 
his continental dominions. England was not a province of the Duke of 
Normandy and Aquitaine ; Gascony and Guienne were French provinces in 
the possession of the king of England. 

V 

HENRY III. AND SIMON DE MONTFORT 

On John's death the small group of loyalist barons and bishops was 
prompt to proclaim his young son Henry king. At its head was the 
stout old Earl Marshal, William of Pembroke, who accepted the office of 
Protector ; supported by Ranulf of Chester, as well as by the Justiciar 
Hubert de Burgh and the legate Gualo, who represented the new Pope 
Honorius III. The great Charter was reissued by the new government, 
but with a significant suspension of the clauses which forbade taxation 
except by consent of the Great Council. The rebels were at pause ; uneasy 
and dissatisfied with the Dauphin and his French companions, but unwilling 
to submit to the loyalists. Hostilities were suspended till the early summer 
of the next year, by which time there had been appreciable accessions to 
the king's party. The run-away fight known as the " Fair of Lincoln " 
turned the scale ; and this was followed in August by the victory of Hubert 
de Burgh in the Straits of Dover over a considerable fleet bringing French 
reinforcements for the Dauphin. Louis saw that the struggle had become 
hopeless, and came to terms in September. An almost complete amnesty was 
granted to the rebels, the exception being in the severity displayed by the 
papal legate Gualo towards the clergy who had opposed the Crown in defiance 
of the papal commands — a severity which accentuated the disposition of 
the English clergy to resent the exercise in England of control by Rome. 



102 



NATION MAKING 



The Earl Marshal lived only eighteen months longer, ruling during 
that time with firmness and moderation. On his death the control passed 

to Hubert de Burgh and the Bishop of 
Winchester, Peter des Roches, a Poitevin 
like John's queen and her kinsfolk, who 
placed himself at the head of the foreign 
element which John — forced to depend 
on mercenaries — had brought into the 
country. Gualo's successor Pandulph 
sought to enforce a papal supremacy, 
but retired in face of the combination 
of Hubert and Peter ; while Stephen 
Langton persuaded the Pope to give up 
imposing foreign legates on the country. 
The barons were leaderless, and for a 
time there was a struggle for power 
between the foreign party inspired by the 
bishop and the patriots represented by 
the justiciar, from which Hubert de Burgh 
emerged triumphant. 

But in 1227 Henry III. came of age 
and assumed the government. For five 
years Hubert remained his chief minister, 
bearing the burden of the young king's 
follies and doing his best to counteract 
or minimise their bad effects ; while Peter 
des Roches intrigued to undermine his 
position. In 1232 the intriguer in his 
turn achieved success ; charges of malad- 
ministration and peculation were brought 
against Hubert which could not indeed 
be proved, but were not easy to disprove, 
and he was deprived of office and of most 
of his estates ; though some of his strongest 
political adversaries interposed in his 
favour, and popular sentiment was all on 
the side of the stout old patriot. 

Hubert de Burgh had striven honestly 
and loyally to restore what the misdeeds 
of John had destroyed — a strong central 
government on national lines. Not only 
were the Commons of England English, 
but the baronage of England had become at length definitely English also 
in the course of the last three generations. The barons were resolved that 
the government of England should be English, not foreign, but they 




An early 1 3th century knight. 
[From a tomb at Bitton Church, Somersetshire.] 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 103 

were by no means clearly bent on keeping it strong and centralised. For 
some twenty-five years after the fall of the last great justiciar it is im- 
possible to discover anywhere acknowledged leaders, or a definite positive 
policy in the opposition to the Crown, or a definite plan for remedying 
the persistent misrule, mismanagement, and extravagance. 

King John was a brutal and debauched tyrant, clever enough to have 
been a distinguished statesman and general had he not been the slave of his 
own passions and vices, which were ignoble without qualification. Henry 
was neither cruel nor debauched, and if he had recognised his own intel- 
lectual limitations and allowed himself to be guided by sensible and 
patriotic advisers, he would have been an eminently respectable monarch. 
Unfortunately, although he was pious and a gentleman, he was obstinately 
determined to go his own way, which was invariably unwise ; and like 
many other obstinate but shortsighted persons, he was generally managed 
by crafty intriguers who took advantage of his weaknesses to gain their 
own ends. But there was nothing so fatal as his persistent mistrust of all 
Englishmen, which led him habitually to repose his confidence in foreign 
advisers, and to place the administration in the hands of men who, what- 
ever their merits, were detested as spoil-hunting aliens and were wholly 
un-English in their sympathies. 

In the first stage the alien domination was that of the Poitevins, the 
allies or proteges of Peter des Roches. But Henry's marriage in 1236 to 
Eleanor of Provence, whose mother was of the house of Savoy, brought an 
incursion of tire young queen's Savoyard uncles and Provencal kinsmen, 
who had been disappointed of expected profits when Eleanor's sister 
married the king of France, Louis IX. ; and a few years later there was a 
fresh influx of Poitevins, sons and kinsfolk of Henry's mother, who had 
married again. To these alien swarms had to be added members of the 
French nobility who by descent or marriage discovered claims to territories 
in England. When Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester, first 
appeared on the scene, he was a conspicuous member of this last group, 
though as time passed he identified himself with the country of his 
adoption and made himself the whole-hearted champion of English liberties. 
And while Henry's jealousy of the English baronage provided power, place, 
and profit for the foreigners, his pious submission to the papacy made him 
ready to accede to every demand of the Holy See, to pour the revenues of 
the National Church into the Roman Treasury, and to fill ecclesiastical 
vacancies with the nominees of the Pope. 

The influence of Peter des Roches was first challenged by Richard 
Marshal, the son of the Protector, perhaps the one man who was fitted to 
head a patriotic opposition. But the Earl was done to death by a treacher- 
ous stratagem while in Ireland, and although the baronage and the clergy, 
headed by the new Archbishop, Edmund Rich, succeeded in forcing the 
Bishop of Winchester into retirement, there was no one strong enough to 
dominate the king, who kept the management of matters in his own 



104 NATION MAKING 

incompetent hands. A series of magnificent marriages, including that of 
the king's sister to the German Emperor Frederick II., as well as the king's 
own nuptials, involved a tremendous expenditure, which was bitterly grudged 
while it could hardly be resisted. Matters were not improved when Henry 
made an unpopular military expedition to Poitou, of which only a remnant 
was left to the Angevins. Year after year saw repeated protests against 
taxation and extravagance on the part of the Great Council, a body which 
still for practical purposes usually consisted of the greater barons and 
ecclesiastics. 

At last in 1244 the opposition began to formulate something like a 
scheme for controlling the king. Their leaders on this occasion were the 
king's brother Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort, who a few 
years earlier had been allowed to marry a sister of the king. They urged, 
though without success, that three great officers of state, the justiciar, the 
chancellor, and the treasurer, should be elected, and a permanent council 
appointed with some power of control. But the attempt collapsed. Mont- 
fort was for some years employed abroad mainly in establishing the king's 
authority in Gascony ; while the position of Richard of Cornwall prevented 
him from acting energetically in antagonism to the king. Edmund Rich 
of Canterbury, a saint but not a strong statesman, was succeeded by one 
of the queen's uncles, Boniface of Savoy, who showed considerable inde- 
pendence, and was apparently willing to act as a good Englishman, but 
was inevitably under suspicion as a member of the Savoyard family. 
Practically the papacy and the Crown combined to lay the country under 
ever-increasing impositions, which neither the baronage nor the national 
clergy were strong enough to resist effectively. 

The climax, however, was reached when the king accepted from the 
Pope Innocent IV. the nomination of his second son Edmund to be King 
of Sicily, which the papacy was determined to take out of the hands of the 
Hohenstauffen. In accepting the kingdom, Henry in effect pledged him- 
self to extract from England money for Innocent and his successor 
Alexander IV. to carry through the papal quarrel with the Hohenstauffen, 
which had nothing whatever to do with England. The immense demands 
involved upon the national purse strained the endurance of baronage and 
clergy to the breaking point. The opposition closed up its ranks ; although 
in 1257, a portion of Henry's demands were conceded, the Great Council, 
known as the Mad Parliament, which assembled in 1258, insisted uncom- 
promisingly on the redress of grievances. 

The grievances and the proposed remedy were formulated in the Pro- 
visions of Oxford. The facts of portentous extravagance, illegal exactions, 
endless mismanagement, military incapacity, and subservience to the papacy 
were patent. Henry's expeditions in France had ended, not in the re- 
covery, but in the complete loss of Poitou. Llewelyn, the Prince of North 
Wales, had succeeded practically for the first time in uniting nearly the 
whole of Wales in defiance of England, and the attempts to bring him to 




wt'u&wKv-'i'tWicf antf ^W<r nt ft$ ttwSii fuftwtfe efa wfottia .'Tandem i? muf wy rw> 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY KNIGHTS IN BATTLE 










THE KING CONFERS WITH THE ARCHITECT AT THE BUILDING OF A NEW CATHEDRAL 

Drawings from an early Thirteenth Century MS. by Matthew Paris 

From the original MS. in the British Museum. The drawings are perhaps by Matthew Paris himself, 
and were certainly made in St. Alban's Abbey under his supervision about 1250. 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 105 

subjection had failed ignominiously. All these troubles the barons attri- 
buted in the main to the king's employment of aliens in nearly all posi- 
tions of trust. Repeated confirmations of the modified Charter went for 
nothing when there were no means of compelling the king to carry out 
his pledges. So the Provisions demanded a clean sweep of the aliens and 
of incompetent and corrupt officials. But they went much further, and 
insisted on the appointment of a quite novel species of oligarchy, which, 
on the one hand, was to take the place of the Great Council, and on the 
other was to exercise complete control over the administration. The 
arrangements were extravagantly complicated ; but the practical outcome 
was that there was to be a supreme council of fifteen, two committees of 
twenty-four, and another committee of twelve, with various functions to 
discharge, all the committees being made up so that one group of the 
greater barons were members of each, and government was to be perma- 
nently vested in the hands of a few families. 

But the oligarchy was united in nothing but the determination to 
remove the control of the government from the king's hands. The system 
could in no case have been shaped into a working constitution, Montfort 
would probably have entirely repudiated the idea that he was seeking his 
own personal aggrandisement ; his honest aim was the establishment of a 
strong and just government. But also he would probably never have re- 
garded any government as strong and just in which he was not practically 
the dictator. There were others who wanted a strong and just government, 
but would not" have Montfort as dictator. And there were others who 
were actuated by merely personal ambition, and wanted to dominate the 
government for their own personal ends. Within four years the oligarchs 
were hopelessly at odds among themselves, and half of them, in order to 
overthrow Montfort, had gone over to the side of the king, who in his turn 
obtained from the Pope a dispensation from his repeated oaths to observe 
the Provisions. At last there was a general agreement to refer the whole 
question to the arbitration of the French king, Louis IX., one of the noblest 
characters of the century. Louis gave his award, known as the Mise of 
Amiens, in January 1264, entirely on the side of Henry. 

Montfort repudiated the award as the other side would undoubtedly 
have done had it gpne against them. Both sides appealed to arms. 
Montfort had emphatically championed popular rights and popular liberties, 
as his opponents had championed baronial privileges. The contest now 
was not one between the Crown and the barons, but between a popular 
party headed by Montfort and supported by the towns and Commons 
generally, and a feudal party which had joined hands with the supporters 
of the Crown. But Montfort was far superior to his adversaries in military 
skill ; and although the odds at first had seemed against him, when the 
opposing forces met in a pitched battle at Lewes he was completely 
victorious ; Henry himself and his eldest son, who afterwards became 
Edward I., were obliged to surrender to him. 



106 NATION MAKING 

Thus Earl Simon was able practically to dictate to the king a new 
arrangement known as the Mise of Lewes. The government was to be 
in the hands of a council, and the council was to be appointed by a 
committee of arbitrators from which all aliens were to be excluded. The 
arrangement collapsed at once, because no tolerably impartial committee 
could be brought together. But immediately afterwards the Great Council 

was again assembled, at which there 
was again present that fleeting element, 
the representative knights of the shire. 
To this Council or Parliament Earl 
Simon presented a new scheme. The 
Council was itself to appoint three 
electors, none of whom were to be 
aliens. The three electors were to 
nominate a council of nine. The nine 
were to appoint all officers of state, 
and were in fact to control the govern- 
ment. The parliament chose as 
electors Montfort himself with the 
young Earl Gilbert of Gloucester and 
the Bishop of Chichester, two of his 
strongest supporters. The arrange- 
ment meant the dictatorship of Simon 
de Mcntfort. 

At the end of the year the dictator 
summoned the famous parliament 
which met at the beginning of 1265. 
Hitherto the Great Council had con- 
sisted of the greater barons and higher 
clergy, summoned personally by the 
king, occasionally but irregularly sup- 
plemented by elected knights of the 
shire. Not all of the greater barons 
were summoned to Montfort's parlia- 
ment, which was in fact a packed assembly, but the Earl introduced 
an important innovation. Besides the elected knights of the shire, he 
selected a number of boroughs, which were in general favourable to him, 
and summoned two elected burgesses from each of them. The parliament 
is famous, not because of what it accomplished, but because it was the first 
in which the burgess element was represented. There had been previous 
occasions when burgesses had been summoned for consultation and to give 
information, but they had not been allowed any voice in the actual delibera- 
tions of the Council. Montfort set a precedent which was not to be perma- 
nently adopted till thirty years afterwards, but its importance is not there- 
fore to be underrated 




Simon de Montfort the elder. 
[From a window in Chartres Cathedral, about 1230.] 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 107 

Montfort professedly intended the method of government instituted 
after the Mise of Lewes to serve merely as a modus vivendi until a permanent 
system could be agreed upon. But in the meanwhile the other side was 
mustering troops in France for a renewal of the war, and the provisional 
government was constantly threatened from the side of the Welsh marches., 
where Mortimer stood for the king's party. Earl Simon's popularity was 
derived from those qualities in his character which had won for him the 
name of Earl Simon the Righteous, and heroes of the Puritan type are 
generally prone to make enemies. His sons lacked their father's idealism 
and alienated many who would willingly have supported the Earl himself. 
They quarrelled with the Earl of Gloucester, who opened negotiations with 
Mortimer. Prince Edward escaped from his custody and joined the 
Marcher earls who rose in arms. 

The insurgents were in overwhelming force from north to south of the 
Welsh marches. Montfort had at last met his match. A year before he 
had out-generalled the Royalists ) and at the battle of Lewes, Prince Edward 
had played the part of Prince Rupert in the great Rebellion four hundred 
years afterwards. His cavalry charge had swept away the wing of Simon's 
army opposed to him, but he had rushed on in a prolonged pursuit and 
returned to the field only to find the battle lost. It was the blunder of 
inexperience. Edward had learnt his lesson and realised the importance 
of scientific strategy and scientific tactics in war. Montfort's son was at 
Kenilworth in Warwickshire, and with him the Earl intended to form a 
junction and then crush the Prince a But Edward struck at the younger 
Montfort before the elder arrived. When the Earl reached Evesham, 
instead of being joined by his son, he was met by the Prince in superior 
force. With anything like equal capacity in the leaders the result of the 
battle was a foregone conclusion. Montfort's army was annihilated and he 
himself was slain. 

Nearly two years elapsed before pacification was completed. Gloucester 
had turned against Montfort on personal grounds, but his aims had always 
been nearly akin to those of Montfort himself ; and when the Royalists 
seemed to him to be using their victory unjustly, he threatened to raise 
revolt again. But, in fact though not in name, Edward had already taken 
his father's place. The great Earl was dead, but essentially his cause was 
victorious. Edward was Montfort's disciple in statesmanship as well as 
in war ; and the Crown itself took up the task of establishing a government 
which should be at once just, strong, and patriotic. Five years after 
Evesham order had been so completely restored, and the existence of a 
new and firm regime so thoroughly recognised, that Edward himself was 
able to leave the country on the last crusade in which an English Prince 
took part, and to remain absent for four years, although his father died 
during the interval. 

Earl Simon's career is unique in English history. Born and bred a 
foreigner, a younger son of that Simon de Montfort of European fame who 



108 NATION MAKING 

led the crusade against the Albigenses and acquired the county of Toulouse, 
he came to England merely to make good a claim to the earldom of 
Leicester which had descended to his father. At the outset he was in the 
eyes of Englishmen a typical alien, to be classed with the Poitevins and 
Savoyards ; especially when he obtained the royal assent to his marriage 
with one of the king's sisters, a marriage which greatly disgusted the king's 
brother, Richard of Cornwall. Yet we find him associated with Richard 
as most prominent among the barons in calling for a revision of the whole 
system of government after Henry's expedition to Poitou. He won 
himself a foremost place by his high abilities as a soldier and as an 
administrator, which were put to the proof when he was sent abroad to 
govern Gascony in the king's name. But his high moral character with 
its Puritan quality, his idealism, his devotion to a cause which appealed 
not at all to other men of his own class, singled him out even more than 
his abilities from the rest of the English magnates and made him inevitably 
the leader. There is little enough sign in him of constructive statesman- 
ship ; he was one of those men who with power in his own hands would 
have ruled autocratically, with even-handed justice according to his lights, 
and with a single eye to the welfare not of himself, not of a class, but of 
the community at large. But the one innovation introduced by him which 
was in the long run to be permanently established, the representation of 
the towns in the National Council, was merely an accident, the outcome 
of the fact that he was himself assured of the support of that new element. 
None of the machinery which he devised for controlling the power of the 
Crown could conceivably have been made permanent with beneficial results, 
though it must also be remarked that he himself never intended it to be 
permanent. His greatness lies in his insistence on the principle that the 
aim of the government must be the prosperity of the whole state, and his 
manifest desire to make the government a government by national consent. 



VI 

ASPECTS 

Norman kings bore sway in England for eighty-eight years. That period 
was not one of progress ; it cannot be said that at the end of it the people 
of England were more prosperous or the political status of the country 
higher than in the days of Canute or of the Confessor. Superficially at 
least the Conquest has the appearance of a convulsion which turned the 
land upside down from end to end, overthrew its institutions, and set up 
an entirely new system while imposing upon the English control by an 
alien and conquering race. We are able to discover, when we get below 
the surface, that fundamental institutions were not after all destroyed. The 
Normans introduced a new factor, but they did not wipe out what they 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 109 

had found before them. The new factor and the old conditions, violently 
antagonistic as they were at the outset, had to be adapted to each other 
and harmonised into new conditions, which should render a national 
growth possible. The Conqueror by blood and iron, and Henry I. with 
his cold-blooded aptitude for business, constructed out of the warring 
elements foundations on which it was possible for their successors to build 
and which even the impotence of Stephen did not obliterate. The building 
was taken in hand by the first of the Plantagenets and the era of English 
progress began. 

Henry II. found the hostility of Norman and Englishman already being 
forced into the background by the common danger from unlicensed feudal- 
ism which threatened the bulk of the Normans no less than the Englishmen 
themselves. Before the close of his reign a notable public official, Richard 
FitzNeal, could affirm in his Dialogus de Scaccario {i.e. the Exchequer) that 
Norman and Englishman had become practically indistinguishable outside 
the class of villeins. The unifying process was completed when the separa- 
tion from Normandy identified the interests of even the greater baronage 
entirely with the country in which all their estates now lay ; and at least 
from the beginning of the thirteenth century, the entire baronage looked 
upon itself as English and was imbued with the nationalist conception of 
the state. This disappearance of racial hostility was the first condition of 
national progress. 

The second necessary condition was the development of a higher moral 
standard. The Conquest tended to force to the front all the baser and 
more brutal qualities alike in the conquerors and in the conquered — greed, 
cruelty, vindictiveness, treachery. The sheer excesses of Stephen's reign 
brought about reaction, a craving for order, a revulsion against the principle 
that might is right. In all the civil strifes during the Angevin period there 
was no reappearance of the horrors of the anarchy. But the change which 
came was more than a mere revulsion against abnormal excesses. A positive 
conception of personal duties and obligations permeated the higher ranks 
of the community. Barons and knights were not indeed possessed with a 
sudden spirit of altruistic self-sacrifice, but the chivalric ideal became elevated 
and purified though it was often enough misdirected. A Cceur de Lion 
provided an infinitely higher type for imitation than a Rufus ; and the 
change which made a Richard rather than a Rufus the ideal of knighthood 
prepared the way for a conception of knighthood which took for its ideal a 
St. Louis or a Simon de Montfort. Men had learnt at least to pursue ends 
that were not purely selfish, and to take thought for the public good. 

In bringing about this change the Church played a not inglorious part. 
At the close of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth, the papacy 
was in aggressive conflict with the lay potentates of Europe. But England 
was too remote from Rome to be very directly involved in that struggle. 
The claims of the Roman pontiff until the thirteenth century were for the 
most part resisted alike by the Crown and by the clergy in England ; and 



no NATION MAKING 

in the thirteenth century it was the Crown which submitted to those claims 
while the clergy continued to resist them. The political aggression of the 
papacy, however, was in itself the outcome of a lofty conception of the 
Church's duty in the world, a conception by which the clergy in England 
were as emphatically actuated as the Popes themselves. 

From Lanfranc to Edmund Rich the archbishops of Canterbury and 
many of the bishops provided conspicuous examples of that public spirit 
which only began to make its appearance among the lay baronage in the 

time of Henry II. Becket 
and the Popes of the 
thirteenth century were, 
responsible for translating 
the ecclesiastical ideal into 
one of conflict between 
the ecclesiastical and the 
secular authority ; but 
Stephen Langton, 
Edmund Rich, and the 
great bishop Grossetete of 
Lincoln, the friend of 
Simon de Montfort, were 
the foremost champions 
of the highest ideals of 
their day. 

And to their support 
came a new movement 
which gave the religious 
sentiment a new vitality. 
The orders of Mendicant 
friars, founded by St. 
Francis of Assisi and by 




Ordination of a priest, 12th century. 
[From the Roll of Guthlac in the British Museum.] 



St. Dominic, were planted in England just after the accession of Henry III. 
By precept and example the brothers taught men to deny themselves, not, 
like the ascetics, for the discipline or salvation of their own souls, but for 
the welfare of others, material as well as moral. 

Political and moral progress reacted upon material progress to which 
the Conquest had in the first place given a set-back. The villeins of 
Domesday had been freemen ; by the time of Henry II. they had become 
in the eyes of the law serfs bound to the soil. But with the development 
of the new conditions they ceased to be the victims of perpetual oppression. 
In practice they were not greatly affected by the change in their legal status, 
because in practice it would very rarely have occurred to the villein to wish 
to leave the soil on which he was born, and if he did so wish, the difficulties 
would in general have been almost insuperable. But we have now to 
distinguish. The villein had now come to be roughly identified with the 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS in 

man who held his land from a lord to whom he owed agricultural service, 
while he who held by payment in coin or in kind was generally looked upon 
as a free man. The effect of the Conquest had been to transfer large 
numbers of the latter class to the former. But with the new conditions 
came an increasing tendency to allow services to be commuted for payment ; 
with the necessary complementary tendency to employ labour for which 
wages were paid, in place of the compulsory labour which was commuted 
for rent. This movement was further facilitated by the growing employ- 
ment of coin as a medium of exchange and of payment, in place of the 
more primitive methods of barter and payment in kind which necessarily 
prevailed when the precious metals were generally unavailable. 

The change marked improved relations between the lords of the soil 
and the actual cultivators, a gradual passing of the feeling that the 
one class were practically the chattels of the other. But it does not 
otherwise imply any material modification in the manner of life of the 
rural population. A more prominent feature, however, of the period is the 
development of the boroughs. 

The borough or town, in the sense in which we shall now use that 
term, was, as we have seen, at the time of the Conquest, merely a larger tun, 
township or village, formed either by expansion or by the aggregation 
of two or more townships in a single community. Life in the town did 
not differ essentially from life in the village ; the population was mainly 
concerned with agriculture. But so far as trade existed, the town was the 
centre of tracle. Within this larger community men specialised to a 
greater extent in the few handicrafts which were practised. Thither to 
market or to fair came the village folk who had produce to exchange for 
goods which their own labour could not provide. The Norman demanded 
more and better goods of various kinds than had satisfied the Saxon ; and 
the Conquest brought in its train foreign merchants with manufactured 
wares to sell, and willing to buy the raw materials which were the only 
English produce of which they stood in need. Foreign commerce in the 
sense of commerce with foreigners in England increased, for the English 
themselves did very little in the way of direct import or export. Roughly 
speaking, the trade within each county or shire was concentrated in one 
or two boroughs, and, on a larger scale, in the half-dozen leading towns in 
the kingdom, London and Winchester, York, Lincoln and Norwich, and 
Bristol. 

The borough lay sometimes within the lordship of a single manor ; 
more often perhaps two or more lords of the manor had jurisdiction within 
its borders. It was also subject to the jurisdiction of the king's officers, 
often because it had originally acquired its dignity as a burh, a fortified 
garrison town. It regarded its neighbours with jealousy and counted 
their citizens foreigners, to be admitted to the privilege of trading only 
because it was inconvenient or impossible to do without them ; so they 
were to be generally discouraged and made to pay for the privilege. 




ii2 NATION MAKING 

The boroughs were already possessed of certain powers of self-govern- 
ment separating them from the jurisdiction of the shire authorities, but 
they had a natural desire to be free also from manorial control and from 
that of the king's officers. Throughout the early Plantagenet period one 
borough after another acquired immunities or privileges by a charter or 
a series of charters obtained from the lords of the manor and the kings. 
These rights were not granted for nothing, since they involved the 
surrender by the authority which granted the charter of rights financially 

valuable, tolls and fees. In one 
way or another the charters were 
purchased at a price, and were 
granted most readily by kings or 
lords when in want of money. 

The powers and rights conferred 
by the charters were not identical in 
form, but the same two objects 
were always in view — immunity 
from outside jurisdiction, which was 
to be vested instead in the freemen 
of the borough, and authority to 
establish a gild-merchant having 
power to regulate trade in the 
borough. 

In discussing the gild-merchant we are on exceedingly debatable 
ground, and can only put forward probable explanations which must not 
be taken as dogmatic pronouncements. Apparently in the first instance, 
wherever a gild-merchant was established, the freemen of the borough 
formed themselves into two separate organisations with separate officers for 
the discharge of two separate functions — town government, which was the 
work of the corporation, and trade regulation, which was the work of the 
gild-merchant. But the gild-merchant became distinct from the body 
of the freemen of the borough, because in the first place the men who 
were not engaged in trade would not enroll themselves in the gild- 
merchant, and in the second place the gild-merchant admitted to its 
membership persons who were not freemen of the borough. The most 
explicit constitutional regulation of the gild-merchant was that no one 
should be permitted to trade within the borough, except by special 
occasional licence, unless he had been admitted to membership of the 
gild-merchant. On the other hand, the gild was not a private association 
which captured the control of trade, but was a body to which every 
burgess was entitled to belong if he chose. The term merchant had not, 
it must be remembered, its modern signification ; the manufacturer, the 
wholesaler, and the retailer had not been differentiated. Every one with- 
out distinction who sold goods was a merchant. 

The gild-merchant could carry its regulations down to the minutest 



Travellers in Anglo-Norman dress. 
[From a 12th century MS.] 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 113 

details. It could fix wages and prices, standards of quality, the time at 
which work might be done. The idea of free competition had not come 
into existence. Buying and selling was, of course, a matter of bargaining, 
but no one had any doubt that a public authority was entitled for the 
public good to draw the line between fair and unfair bargaining. It was 
the legitimate business of the gild-merchant to take such measures as it 
thought fit to ensure good workmanship, fair dealing, and fair wages and 
prices. 



VII 
SCOTLAND 

Scotland affords no counterpart to the constitutional struggles with 
which England had been so largely occupied for three-quarters of a century 
when Henry III. died ; and the process of consolidation which went on in 
the northern kingdom was also on quite different lines. For England the 
vital fact was that the country ceased to be merely a portion of the 
dominions of a European potentate, and that French provinces became 
merely appanages of the English crown. Scotland, on the other hand, had 
no foreign possessions and no direct interest in European politics. For 
her, foreign policy meant relations with only two powers, England and 
Norway. 

But Scotland itself was composed of much more heterogeneous elements 
than England. A dynasty, which until the middle of the eleventh century 
was pure Celt, had established a claim to supremacy over the whole of the 
lands north of the Tweed ; but very little Celtic blood ran in the veins of 
the Scottish kings. Malcolm Canmore's mother was a daughter of Siward 
the Dane, Earl of Northumbria ; his wife was the sister of Edgar the 
^Etheling ; his son David, the progenitor of the later kings of Scotland, 
married the heiress of Siward's son Waltheof. Thus the royal family was 
to an immense extent Saxonised, and as time went on became also very 
much Normanised. Of the dominions over which it ruled, two-thirds of 
the Lowlands and much of the eastern coastal districts beyond the Forth, 
though still perhaps mainly Celtic in race, were Teutonised in character ; 
but Galloway at least, on the west, and the whole of the highlands, were 
almost entirely Celtic ; while the population of the islands was partly 
Celtic and partly Norwegian ; and Caithness, as well as the Orkneys and 
Shetlands, was almost entirely Norwegian. From Shetland to the Isle 
of Man the isles fell under two groups known as the Nordereys and 
the Sudereys, and it was exceedingly doubtful whether they regarded their 
allegiance as due to the King of Norway or to the King of Scotland, while 
the Earl of Caithness, a Norseman, paid homage to the King of Scots for 
Caithness itself and to the King of Norway for the Orkneys. 

H 




ii 4 NATION MAKING 

The Celtic highlands resented the supremacy of the Anglicised royal 
house, and whenever it suited them supported any pretenders to the throne 
who might appear ; of whom there were two groups, one the MacHeths, 
claiming by descent from the son of Lady Macbeth, in whose name 
Macbeth himself had seized the crown ; while the other group, the Mac- 
Williams, descended from an elder son of Malcolm Canmore by his first 
marriage. So that there was, broadly speaking, a Scandinavian or semi- 
Scandinavian fringe which leaned towards Norway, a great Celtic population 

covering nearly the whole of the 
north and the west which still 
clung to the old tribal system 
and detested the Anglo-Norman 
form of feudalism, and a large 
Teutonic or Teutonised popula- 
tion, mainly in the Lothians, 
which accepted the Anglo-Nor- 
manised monarchy and its Anglo- 
Norman institutions. But this 
section, the wealthiest and the 
most progressive, remained stub- 
bornly antagonistic to the Eng- 
lish of England ; while the kings 
resented the English claims to 
overlordship, and at every avail- 
able opportunity made counterclaims on the English counties north of the 
Tees. 

The period of wildest anarchy in England, when Stephen was king, was 
the period when David I. in Scotland was organising unity in Church and 
State, extending Anglo-Norman institutions, and introducing a very con- 
siderable Norman leaven into what was now becoming the Scottish 
baronage. David died a year before Stephen. His eldest grandson and 
immediate heir was placed on the throne as Malcolm IV. (nicknamed the 
Maiden) at the age of twelve ; and was followed twelve years later by his 
brother William, called the Lion. William died in the fifteenth year of his 
reign, two years before King John. We have already seen how he was 
captured in the reign of Henry II., when raiding the north of England with 
intent to assert his claims in Northumberland and Cumberland, and how 
he was compelled to do homage for the kingdom of Scotland to the King of 
England by the treaty of Falaise, which was abrogated fifteen years after- 
wards by Richard Cceur de Lion. 

After this time the Scots claim for Northumberland and Cumberland 
was not again made a pretext for war, although it was from time to time 
asserted when the King of England appeared to be in a dangerous strait. 
Moreover, for a hundred years no attempt was made by any King of 
England to enforce a claim of sovereignty over Scotland ; though on 



David I. and Malcolm IV. of Scotland. 
[From the Kelso Abbey Charter, about 1160.] 



THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS 115 

sundry occasions when a Scots king did homage for possessions in England 
the English king sought without success to exact homage for the Scottish 
crown also. 

The last of the MacHeth and MacWilliam insurrections were sup- 
pressed on the accession of William's young son Alexander II., a vigorous 
monarch who reigned from 12 14 to 1249. He met his death on a western 
expedition, undertaken in order to bring under his dominion the southern 
isles, which at this stage professed allegiance to Norway. Twelve years 
earlier he had finally settled the Northumbrian question, by commuting his 
claims for estates in those counties held from the King of England. 

His son and successor Alexander III. was only a boy of eight, and the 
years of his minority foreshadowed what was afterwards to become the 
normal state of affairs on the demise of a Scottish king. A child succeeded 
to the throne, and opposing factions of the more powerful barons en- 
deavoured to capture the person of the young king and the authority of 
the regency. When young Alexander came of age, however, he asserted 
his authority undisputed by either of the rival factions ; and very shortly 
afterwards the Norwegian question was settled as the dynastic question in 
Scotland itself had already been settled. Alexander resolved to assert his 
authority over the islands. The chiefs appealed to King Haakon of Norway, 
and according to Scottish tradition Haakon attempted to make good his 
own claims by an invasion on the west. The Norsemen were routed at 
the battle of Largs, and three years later Haakon's successor, Eric, King of 
Norway, ceded t-o Alexander all his claims on the islands except the Orkneys 
and Shetlands. King Eric subsequently married Alexander's daughter, 
Alexander himself having married a daughter of Henry III. 

Broadly speaking, the whole period under review was one of prosperity 
for Scotland. After the Norwegian treaty following the battle of Largs the 
royal authority was recognised over the whole of the mainland and the 
islands from Cape Wrath to the Solway. The risk of political disruption 
or of a dynastic overthrow had practically disappeared ; and in the Low- 
lands at least, north as well as south of the Forth, the Church flourished 
and commercial towns were developing. No one anticipated the storms 
which were destined to arise after the death of Alexander III. 



BOOK II 

NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION (1272-1485) 

CHAPTER V 
NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 

I 

THE REIGN OF EDWARD I 

The reign of Edward I. marks an epoch in the history of the peoples 
of Great Britain. It saw the subjugation of Wales and her incorporation 
into the English kingdom. It saw that attempt at the incorporation of 
Scotland which aroused the fierce struggle for Scottish independence that 
was decisively concluded in the ensuing reign. Scotland achieved her 
liberty ; and if liberty were not itself priceless, we might be tempted to 
say that the price she paid in after years was excessive. In England it 
saw the final confirmation of the nationalism which had been developing 
during the previous century, and the establishment of the constitutional 
system, which assured to a representative parliament the control of the 
public purse and all which that control implies. It may be doubted 
whether any one of these things would have happened but for the per- 
sonality of the king who occupied the throne of England. 

For two hundred years England had been ruled by kings of whom 
all except the two last spent more than half their lives outside her 
borders. The two exceptions, John and Henry III., had both stood in 
direct antagonism to the national ideas growing up amongst the baronage, 
who had hitherto been as alien and un-English as the kings themselves. 
With those ideas Edward identified himself, so that he became the typical 
national leader, presenting in his own person and character with a 
singular precision those qualities which have ever since characterised the 
nation of which he was the head. 

The English people, although foreign critics have always reproached 
them with inordinate greed, while to some they have appeared, like the 
Carthaginians to the Romans, as the typically a perfidious " race, have always 
prided themselves on their love of justice. No less have they prided 
themselves on their love of liberty, although again the foreign critic is apt 
to denounce their tyranny. In fact they have always loved liberty passion- 

"7 



n8 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

ately, in the concrete for themselves, and in the abstract for their neigh- 
bours. But this has not prevented them from being perfectly confident 
that it is good for other people to be ruled by them. There is, indeed, 
ample warrant for that belief ; but it has been apt to leave out of count 
the fact that other peoples hold the same view of liberty which they take 
for themselves, and prefer their own self-rule, however defective, to a rule 
forced upon them, however admirable. The Englishman loves strict 
justice administered without fear or favour, but he has an aptitude for 
persuading himself that the course of strict justice, and the course which 
coincides with his own interest, are identical ; though if he fail so to 
persuade himself, he will choose the course which he believes to be just. 
He will keep faith with resolute precision ; the letter of his bond is sacred ; 
but he is given to taking an advantage of the letter himself, and is some- 
what inclined when occasion arises to evade the spirit in reliance on 
the letter. Hence the fervid denunciations of England as tyrannical and 
greedy, hypocritical and perfidious, by those who have suffered from her 
methods. Edward 1. was an exemplar of the English national char- 
acter as here portrayed ; whether we look at his Scottish or Welsh policy, 
or study his relations with the England baronage and the English people. 
To Welsh and Scots he is the ruthless king, the tyrannical usurper, though 
he himself probably never had a doubt of the perfect righteousness of 
his treatment of both countries. He took for his own motto Pactum serva, 
"Keep troth," while his enemies denounced him as an unprincipled trickster. 

From a purely English point of view, however, Edward stands out as 
emphatically the greatest of the Plantagenets — the greatest, perhaps, of all 
England's rulers during the six centuries between the grandsons of Alfred 
and Queen Elizabeth. He completed the work of consolidating the Eng- 
lish nation, although he failed in his design of bringing the whole of Great 
Britain under a single sceptre. No other country in Europe was formed into 
such a state of unity till nearly two hundred years afterwards. His legislation 
gave permanent shape to the law. His creation of the Model Parliament 
gave that assembly a form which it retained for more than five hundred 
years, and made it the mouthpiece of the will of the nation ; while its power 
of withholding supplies made the administration increasingly dependent on 
its support and goodwill, as the development of expenditure placed the 
government more and more at the mercy of those who held the purse- 
strings. Government in England became essentially, as it had never been 
before, government by assent of the commons ; government which was not 
controlled by the commons but must rest upon their support. The fact 
stands out, although it is not to be attributed to any relaxation on Edward's 
part of the absolutist theory. Rather it was his aim to create a force which 
would counterbalance that of the baronage and prevent baronial groups 
from dominating the Crown. But it followed also that the Crown must 
conciliate that force, lest it should make common cause with the baronage. 

In another aspect also the reign of Edward I. was of great importance, 
because in it were laid the foundations of national commerce, the sense of 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 119 

community of interests among English traders, and the expansion of trade 
with foreign countries. 

The reign falls broadly into two periods. The first, from 1272 to 1290, 
during which Edward was admirably served by his great Chancellor, Robert 
Burnell, was the period of legislation ; within which fell also the conquest 
of Wales. The second, from i 290 to 1 307, was the period of a constitutional 
struggle in which the two most prominent incidents were the summoning of 
the Model Parliament and the Confirmation of the Charters. In this 
period falls also Edward's attempt to establish the English supremacy over 
Scotland. 

II 
EDWARD'S LEGISLATION 

Down to the time of King John the kings of England had all succeeded 
to the throne only after a form of election ; it had never been recognised 
that there was any one with an indefeasible title to the succession. On 
John's death, when there was no other possible claimant of the blood royal, 
the boy Henry had been proclaimed as a matter of course by the loyalists ; 
there being no other pretender except the French Dauphin. Thenceforth 
the hereditary title was assumed ; though always with a reservation, not 
explicitly set forth, of the right of parliament to set aside the legitimist 
occupant or heir of the throne. Edward himself was in Palestine when 
Henry III. died, but the estates swore fealty without demur to the repre- 
sentatives whom he had appointed. Affairs went on so peaceably that 
Edward made no haste to return. He was at first detained by affairs in 
Gascony, and his relations with his cousin and suzerain, Philip III. of 
France ; and he did not land in England to take up the work of govern- 
ment till 1274. 

The disturbances of Henry's reign had been due to the royal and papal 
exactions and to the favour shown by the king to aliens. The Opposition 
had attempted to find a remedy by setting excessive restrictions upon the 
power of the Crown, by transferring to a baronial oligarchy or a dictator 
powers fraught with danger unless wielded by men of the purest integrity 
and patriotism. From the baronial wars Edward had learnt two political 
lessons ; first, that the strength of the Crown must lie in its accord with 
the feeling of the nation ; and secondly, that it must not be subjected to 
the control of fortuitous baronial combinations. The most irritating 
feature of Henry's government had been that it was unstable, capricious, 
and incalculable. Policy demanded that its methods should be systematic, 
recognisable, clearly defined. It was the object of the legislation to which 
Edward now set himself to make definite what had hitherto been indefinite, 
and thereby to remove sources of disputation ; neither to create nor to 
abolish rights, but to arrive at and keep to a clear understanding and 
acknowledgment of rights which were entitled to recognition ; whether of 
king, barons, clergy, or commons. This definition of rights ought to be 



120 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

arrived at not arbitrarily, but in such a fashion that the various parties con- 
cerned should share the responsibility for the conclusions accepted. 

The process opened with the summoning in 1275 of a parliament in 
which the commons were represented. Of all the sources of friction none 
was more serious than that of taxation. The Great Charter had laid down 
the principle that while the Crown had a legal right to exact feudal dues it had 
no right to make additional exactions except by consent of the Great Council. 
But the dues which the Crown was entitled to exact were inadequately defined, 
and claims which Henry III. asserted had been angrily resented. Moreover, 
there were other claims which in practice were undisputed because their opera- 
tion was limited and their effect as taxation was not realised. Such was the 
authority of the Crown to regulate trade, by the issue of licences and the im- 
position of port duties. The alien who wished to trade in England was only 
allowed to do so under supervision, and had to pay for a licence, and also to pay 
toll on the goods which he imported or exported. Magna Carta had merely 
stipulated in general terms that such tolls should be limited to the right 
and ancient customs. Edward's Statute of Westminster made progress in 
defining the feudal dues to which the king was entitled ; but it also ex- 
plicitly conferred upon the king the right of imposing at the ports a fixed 
toll upon all the exported wool, wool-fells and leather, which, very soon 
came to be known as the " great and ancient customs." The point espe- 
cially noteworthy is that these port duties had not hitherto attracted notice 
as sources of revenue. It was the great expansion of foreign trade now 
setting in which impressed, first on the king and then on the parliament, a 
consciousness of the value to the royal treasury which such impositions 
might attain. It is in this reign that taxes on imports and exports take 
their place beside the land tax, dating from the time of -^Ethelred, and the 
tax on movables dating from the Saladin tithe of Henry II., as sources of 
revenue important enough to demand popular control ; whereas hitherto 
they had been merely an incidental part of the government machinery for 
regulating trade. 

The next step was concerned with a different subject. Various barons 
claimed and exercised various rights of jurisdiction locally, with exemption 
from interference on the part of the king's officers, and in effect superseding 
the royal authority. The Statute of Gloucester empowered the king's 
officers to examine, in virtue of the writ called Quo Warranto, the authority 
under which the barons claimed and exercised these privileges ; on the 
hypothesis that the claims were null and void, unless supported by docu- 
mentary proof that they had been conferred by royal grant. As a matter 
of fact they had been established for the most part only by long custom ; 
and the proceedings of the royal officers aroused among the barons an 
outburst of indignation so threatening that Edward found it necessary to 
withdraw the demand for documentary proof and to accept a compromise, 
under which all such rights were recognised as valid if they had been in 
practice recognised at the accession of Richard I. Nevertheless the king's 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 121 

great object was secured ; since it was thenceforth impossible for those 
rights to be extended or multiplied except 
by express grant of the Crown. 

From the baronage Edward turned to 
the Church. Henry's subserviency to the 
popes, repaid by the support which he 
consistently received from them in his con- 
tests with the baronage, had allowed them 
to make great encroachments, to assert 
successfully their claims to make ecclesi- 
astical appointments, and upon ecclesiastical 
revenues. In 1279 Pope Nicholas III. 
ignored Edward's wishes, and appointed to 
the archbishopric of Canterbury the Fran- 
ciscan friar John Peckham, who immediately 
set about asserting the ecclesiastical as against 
the secular authority in a highly aggressive 
manner. Edward's immediate answer was 
the Statute of Mortmain, which forbade the 
conveyance of land from private ownership 
to the " dead hand " of a corporation with- 
out the assent of the Crown. The parti- 
cular corporation which the king had in 
view was of course the Church ; and the 
justification was twofold. For military pur- 
poses, that is, for the feudal levies, lands 
held by the Church were of less use to the 
Crown than lands held by lay feudatories. 
In the second place, lands held by a cor- 
poration were necessarily exempt from those 
incidental fees and fines to which individual 
owners were liable on succession to an estate 
and in connection with the wardship of 
minors, marriage, and knighthood. In 
practice, indeed, the -new law made very 
little difference, beyond ensuring that the 
transfer of land to the Church should be 
open and bona fide ; but, like the Statute of 
Gloucester, it empowered the Crown to limit 
the extension of an inconvenient practice. 
Two years later Peckham invited another 
collision by an attempt to extend the juris- 
diction of the ecclesiastical courts, which 
was checked by the royal ordinance Circum- 
specte Agatis — a warning to the clergy to attempt no extension of their 




A knight of the 1 3th century. 

[From the brass of Sir John D'Abernoun, died 
1277, at Stoke Dabernon, Surrey.] 



122 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

jurisdiction beyond the limits recognised by the secular authority, which 
were carefully defined. 

This enactment had been deferred by the exigencies of the Welsh war 
to which we shall presently revert. It was issued in 1285, a year of con- 
siderable legislative activity. In that year the second Statute of West- 
minster established the principle of entailing estates by prohibiting the 
tenant from alienating land to the detriment of the rights of his heir. Later 
the parliament sitting at Winchester reorganised the militia, the ancient fyrd 
which Henry II. had regulated by the Assize of Arms a hundred years before, 
and at the same time reorganised the system of local police or " watch and 
ward," and revived the authority and jurisdiction of the local popular courts 
of law. 

The last statute of what we have called the legislative period was that 
of 1290, called Quia Emptores, or the third Statute of Westminster. This, 
like the Statute of Mortmain, was one which had the approval of the baron- 
age and strengthened the landed interest ; but it strengthened the Crown 
still more, since it was a check on feudal disintegration. It forbade subin- 
feudation ; that is, it required that when land was alienated the new tenant 
should hold not from the grantor but from the grantor's overlord ; so that 
the grantor multiplied not his own vassals but the vassals of his overlord ; 
whereby to the king as supreme overlord the maximum of advantage 
accrued. 

Ill 

WALES 

The legislative activities of King Edward were periodically interrupted 
by the contests with the Welsh, which were hardly ended with the overthrow 
of the patriot prince Llewelyn and the absorption of Wales into the English 
dominion. But Edward's conquest was so far practically effective that the 
Welsh thenceforth were troublesome only when they acted in concert with 
English rebels. The story of the relations of the Welsh with their more 
powerful neighbours, and of their final subjugation, may now be briefly told. 

Swept out of England into the mountainous districts beyond the Severn 
by the advance of the Saxons, cut off from their kinsmen in the south by 
the battle of Deorham, and from the Strathclyde Britons in the north by 
the battle of Chester, the Britons in Wales had still defied subjugation by the 
English. Offa of Mercia drove them in behind his dyke ; but the utmost 
that any of the Saxon kings had accomplished was to exact a precarious 
tribute and formal acknowledgments of sovereignty. The raids of the 
mountaineers compelled the Norman sovereigns to grant their own earls 
on the Welsh marches abnormal powers ; a Norman earldom was even 
planted in Pembroke ; but while the lords of Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford, 
and Gloucester carried on perpetual wars with their Welsh neighbours, the 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 123 

Welsh still remained practically independent, separate, speaking their own 
language, following their own customs, and owning no Norman overlord, 
except so far as their various princes found it convenient to acknowledge 
the sovereignty of the King of England. Rufus tried to bring them under 
his heel, but his Welsh invasions ended in ignominious failure ; even Henry 
II. was hardly more successful. The Welsh, like other Celtic peoples, were 
extraordinarily difficult to subdue, and yet lacked the political instinct of 
unity necessary to the formation of a consolidated state capable of establish- 
ing a permanent independence. 

Yet in the thirteenth century such a consummation seemed almost within 
sight. Almost throughout the first half of it, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth was 
lord of Snowdon, the north-western division of the country. He for the 
first time succeeded in combining other Welsh princes under his leadership, 
and made use of the contests between King John, King Henry, and the 
barons to strengthen his own position. When Llewelyn died in 1240, it 
seemed that his work was doomed to be undone ; the Welsh again betook 
themselves to internal strife, until a second Llewelyn, son of Griffith, son of 
the first Llewelyn, succeeded in establishing himself as prince of Gwynedd 
or Snowdon, and assumed the role of a patriot leader in 1254. Since 
Henry's principal supporters among the baronage were to be found among 
the Marcher earls, Llewelyn was presently in alliance with Montfort. 
Nevertheless he did not fall with Montfort, but made his peace with the king 
at Shrewsbury on terms highly satisfactory to himself ; making a formal 
acknowledgment of the English overlordship, and retaining for a price the 
northern territories which had been annexed to the English Crown after the 
death of the first Llewelyn, and recaptured by himself on his first assump- 
tion of the Welsh leadership. 

But Llewelyn on the one side was not content ; he dreamed at least 
of creating an entirely independent principality. Edward, on the other side, 
had his own dream of a dominion extending from Cape Wrath to the 
Channel ; though that dream could not come within the range of practical 
politics while his brother-in-law, Alexander III., reigned in Scotland. There 
was no apparent prospect of an opportunity for dealing with the northern 
kingdom ; but if Llewelyn should give him an opening in Wales he was 
prepared to turn it to- account; though according to his principles he would 
only act under colour of legal right. 

Henry III. was hardly in his grave, and his successor was still abroad, 
when Llewelyn began to experiment with the government of England. 
He evaded every summons to render homage to the new king, and he ceased 
to make the payments required of him under the treaty of Shrewsbury. 
Edward was fully warranted in taking active measures. In the beginning of 
1277 the royal forces advanced in the middle Marches and in South Wales, 
where the Welsh made immediate submission. In the summer he marched 
a great force along the northern Welsh coast, and cooped up Llewelyn 
in the Snowdon district. Faced with the prospect of being starved out 



124 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

in the winter, Llewelyn submitted to the treaty of Aberconway, which 
left him the lordship of only that portion of Gwynedd which he had 
acquired in 1254. 

So far Edward's conduct was unimpeachable, and he now proceeded 
on the lines which present themselves to the English mind as those 
obviously dictated by common sense, and to the Celtic mind as a violation 
of the most cherished sentiment. He tried to Anglicise Wales, and to 
impress upon the Welsh by the force of example the superior merits of 

English institutions. 
The Welsh looked 
askance. Customs 
which in the eyes of 
the English were 
relics of a childish 
barbarism, which an 
intelligent people 
would be prompt to 
repudiate as soon as 
their eyes were 
opened, had to the 
Welshmen the sanc- 
tion of immemorial 
tradition. The Welsh 
mountaineers found 
nothing to admire in 
the little colonies of English traders and agriculturists which were planted 
in the government centres. The English law and the English legal 
machinery offended their instincts and ignored their traditions. The Welsh 
gentry found their rights curtailed and their personal dignity insulted by 
the intruders, who held them in small respect. In a very short time the 
Welshmen were repenting of their submission and craving for escape from 
the beneficent English rule which in their blindness they had brought upon 
themselves. The men whose jealousy and desertion of Llewelyn had made 
his overthrow so easy were the first to turn to him as their only possible 
deliverer. The surface was calm, but under it insurrection was brewing. 
Edward was deaf to complaints which savoured to him of childish not to 
say immoral unreason. The storm broke suddenly and without warning. 

The first blow was struck by a man who had been hitherto a con- 
spicuous adherent of the English, the arch-traitor in the eyes of patriotic 
Welshmen, David the brother of Llewelyn, who had been rewarded by a 
lordship in North Wales. David attacked and captured Hawarden, sur- 
prising it. His stroke was the signal for a general rising. Llewelyn flung 
himself on the English district bordering his principality on the north ; 
David sped south to raise southern Wales. For the moment it seemed as 
if the English would be swept out of the territories of which not five years 




Conway Castle, North Wales. 
[Built during the reign of Edward I. after the English conquest.] 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 125 

ago they had taken possession. No preparation had been made for an 
emergency so wholly unexpected. The Marcher levies, hastily raised, could 
make no immediate headway. The summer passed in a series of isolated 
operations, in which the English gained very little advantage. In the 
autumn Edward had succeeded in getting a considerable force in motion on 
the line of his previous northern campaign ; but the troops, inefficiently 
commanded, met with a disaster in early winter, close to the Menai Strait. 
Edward resolved on the unprecedented course of a winter campaign. 

But five weeks after the Menai disaster a battle and an accident decided 
the results of the struggle. Llewelyn himself had moved down to the middle 
Marches. His forces were posted in a strong position at Orewyn Bridge, 
and he himself was absent, when the English effected a surprise attack. 
Orewyn Bridge is noted as the first occasion when an English army 
employed the method of distributing archers among the men-at-arms and 
opening the battle with artillery to prepare the way for a cavalry charge ; 
an adaptation of the tactics employed by the Conqueror at Hastings, and 
apparently by the English at Northallerton. Orewyn Bridge was improved 
upon some years later by the Earl of Warwick, again in the course of the 
suppression of a Welsh insurrection, at the battle of Maes Madog ; where 
we have a more detailed account of the way in which the archers were dis- 
tributed among the soldiery. To the student of the art of war, at least as 
practised by the English, it is interesting to observe that the long-bow did 
not become conspicuous until after the Welsh campaigns. The cross-bow 
was still accounted the superior weapon. There is reason to suppose that 
although the English archers acquired a unique proficiency in the use of 
the long-bow, they derived the use of the weapon itself in war, not from the 
outlaws of Merry Sherwood, but from the Welshmen. 

At Orewyn Bridge the Welsh were scattered or slaughtered. The acci- 
dent which made the battle practically decisive was the almost simulta- 
neous capture and death of Llewelyn, not on the field of battle ; his slayers 
being unconscious of the prize which had fallen into their hands. 

These events took place in December. For six months more Llewelyn's 
brother David held out in North Wales, while Edward was seriously 
hampered by the defection of the feudal levies which had served their time, 
and by the difficulty of obtaining supplies for the payment of troops. In 
June, however, David was captured, and three months afterwards was put to 
death as a traitor. The conquest was completed. 

The practical effect was that so much of Wales as had hitherto remained 
under Welsh princes, owning not much more than a nominal overlordship 
of the King of England, was now annexed to the direct domains of the 
Crown, the Marcher earldoms and baronies under the great Norman feuda- 
tories not being immediately or directly affected. The new domain formed 
the Crown principality of Wales, which it presently became customary to 
bestow upon the heir-apparent of the English throne. In the principality 
Edward established the regular shire system, raised castles to keep the 



i 2 6 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

country in subjection, and continued the Anglicising process by the plantation 
of English colonies under the castle walls. For some centuries to come the 
principality was governed under the Statute of Wales of 1284 as a Crown 
domain standing outside the general political system of England. But in- 
directly also the Marcher earldoms were affected, because the establishment 
of the king's government in Wales did away with the reasons which had 
necessitated the bestowal of exceptional power and authority in districts 
where a state of war had been practically chronic. 

Ten years after the Statute of Wales there was another insurrection, 
headed by Madog, a son of Llewelyn ; but this was crushed at the battle of 
Maes Madog, to which reference has already been made. After this, though 
the Welsh preserved their sense of nationality, Wales did not again attempt 
to break away from England, and the contingents of light Welsh soldiery 
habitually formed an element in the armies of the Plantagenet kings both 
on their Scottish and their French campaigns. 



IV 

EDWARD AND THE CONSTITUTION 

It is a common note of constitutional struggles in England that they 
have been largely concerned with questions of finance. Primarily in theory 
the policy of the State was the policy of the king. The king was supposed 
to live "of his own," and so long as he could pay his own way he could 
follow what policy he chose. But if he sought to pursue an expensive 
policy he could not live " of his own," and must supplement his resources 
by taxation of one kind or another ; that is, he must either persuade or 
compel his subjects to provide him with additional means. Persuasion 
involved convincing them that the objects he had in view were desirable ; 
in other words, as long as his subjects could refuse supplies, they could 
paralyse the king for action, and therefore could in effect control his policy. 
The Crown, seeking a free hand, sought also every available means of raising 
revenue otherwise than as a grant by favour of the subjects. The subjects, 
on the other hand, without in the first instance having any particular desire 
to interfere with policy, resented arbitrary exactions. The mere fact that, 
by doing so, they found themselves exercising a control over policy, taught 
the people to regard the control of policy as an end to which the control 
of finance was a means ; but to begin with, the motive of the subjects' 
resistance to taxation was not a political one but a simple objection to being 
arbitrarily deprived of their property. Thus the principle laid down in the 
Charter had been that taxation should not be arbitrary ; that apart from 
the liabilities established by recognised custom, no additional liabilities 
should be imposed without the subjects' consent. It is not till the time 
of Edward I. that we have indications of an inclination to be jealous of 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 127 

the development of new sources of revenue in the hands of the Crown ; 
to resent anything which helps the Crown to act independently of supplies 
voluntarily granted by the people. It is the exigencies of war and the 
expenses involved by war that bring financial and therefore constitutional 
questions into the foreground of the latter portion of Edward's reign. 

The affairs of Scotland demand separate and consecutive treatment, 
but their bearing upon other 
aspects of the years between 
1290 and 1307 necessitates some { 
reference to them here. The f) 
death of Alexander III. in 1286, 
followed by that of his grand- 
daughter Margaret, the Maid of 
Norway, four years later, opened 
the debatable question of the 
succession to the Scottish 
Crown. The King of England 
consented to arbitrate between P 
the various claimants on con- 
dition that his own suzerainty 
should be formally recognised. 
The demand was admitted by 
the Scottish magnates, and after 
a prolonged inquiry and investi- 
gation, judgment was delivered 
in 1292 in favour of John 
Balliol, who became King of 
Scotland as Edward's vassal. 
But when it became evident 
that Edward meant to treat his 
suzerainty not, like his pre- 
decessors, as a mere formality, 
but as a substantial fact, Balliol 
and the magnates attempted 
defiance. Edward counted 
Balliol as a recalcitrant vassal, 
declared the crown forfeited, invaded Scotland, and set up an English 
government in 1296. In 1297 Scotland was in revolt, led by William 
Wallace, and the English garrison was expelled. Next year Edward again 
invaded Scotland, and routed the Scots at Falkirk, but withdrew at the end 
of the year, leaving the country by no means subdued. Another invasion 
in 1 301 was ineffective, but a campaign in 1304 was followed by a 
reorganisation of the government of Scotland in 1305. Balliol had dis- 
appeared at an early stage ; Wallace, the popular Scottish hero, was 
captured, and executed in London as a traitor in 1305. But in 1306 a 




The Toll House and Prison, Great Yarmouth. 
[Mostly built in the 13th century.] 



128 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

new liberator appeared in the person of Robert Bruce, and Edward was 
once more preparing for what he intended to be a final and crushing 
conquest when he died, a few miles from the Scottish border, in 1307. 

Now in the year 1292, after twenty years of rule, Edward's position 
appeared exceptionally strong. He was the officially acknowledged over- 
lord of the whole island from end to end, suzerain of Scotland, and master 
of Wales. He had acquired an almost unprecedented reputation as a legis- 
lator. The Marcher earls of Hereford and Gloucester had incidentally 
learnt that they must not presume upon their privileges. Ecclesiastical 
encroachments had been held in check. After the settlement of Wales 
Edward had spent three years abroad, mainly in Gascony, where his relations 
both with his subjects and with his suzerain, Philip IV. of France, were 
apparently satisfactory. Edward's personal prestige among the sovereigns 
of Europe was exceedingly high. Nevertheless both in France and in 
Scotland trouble was brewing, while in England there were members of the 
baronage, notably Humphrey de Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, who were 
vindictively disposed. 

Trouble began with France. Philip 1 IV. meant to get Gascony into his 
own hands, though he did not intend to go to war over it. But apart from 
the antagonistic interests of the two kings in Gascony, their subjects on either 
side of the English Channel were constantly at feud, each perpetually 
charging the others with piracy. In 1293 there was an organised sea-fight, 
in which the English were completely victorious. Philip IV. used the 
opportunity to summon Edward before him as a vassal. Edward, particular 
always in insisting on the letter of the law, could not on his own principles 
ignore Philip's claim. For form's sake certain castles in Gascony were tem- 
porarily placed in Philip's hands. Having got the castles, Philip showed 
his hand, pronounced the duchy forfeited on the ground of Edward's con- 
tumaciousness, and proceeded to establish his own government. 

Philip's action made war inevitable. Parliament was called, large grants 
were made reluctantly enough by the estates, and further, the king arbi- 
trarily took possession of the wool, the staple export of England, which was 
lying at the ports, and compelled the merchants to redeem it at a high 
price. A considerable force was collected and despatched to Gascony. 
Even the Welsh wars had proved that feudal levies, with their limited periods 
of service, provided at the best of times very unsatisfactory armies for the 
conduct of long campaigns. Now, the claims for compulsory service over- 
seas led to that Welsh insurrection which was only suppressed at the begin- 
ning of 1295 by the battle of Maes Madog. The Welsh rising hopelessly 
crippled the expedition to Gascony, where Edward's forces met with repeated 
disaster. It was hardly suppressed when the Scots added to the complications 
by making a treaty with France, the beginning of an alliance which was to 
be as a thorn in the side of the English for more than two and a half 
centuries. Edward even saw himself threatened with a French invasion. 

The king met the immediate danger by a strategic organisation of the fleets 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 129 

in the Channel which marks the first clear recognition of command of the 
sea as a specific need of the military organisation. But beyond this it was 
realised that a situation had arisen in which it was emphatically necessary 
that the nation should consciously identify itself with his policy, and to this 
end he summoned the Model Parliament of 1295. 

The summons to parliament included the significant pronouncement that 
"what touches all should be approved by all," and that the common danger 
should be faced with a united front. To this parliament Edward called all 
the magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, representatives of the lower clergy, two 
knights from every shire, and two burgesses from every borough. Parlia- 
ment had at last almost achieved its permanent shape. The three estates, 
baronage, clergy, and commons, met and deliberated separately, each estate 
taxing itself in answer to the king's appeal. The baronage voted an eleventh, 
the clergy a tenth, the boroughs a seventh. But it is to be observed that 
at this stage the knights of the shire voted with the baronage, not with the 
burgesses. It was not till nearly forty years afterwards that the different 
division was established under which the hereditary and ecclesiastical mag- 
nates sat in one chamber, the shire and borough representatives in another 
as the Commons, while the clergy ceased to attend as an estate of parlia- 
ment, but made their grants in their own separate assembly, called 
Convocation. 

Though Edward was thus enabled, with the nation at his back, to make 
great preparations for meeting the gathering storm of war, he felt himself 
obliged to divide his forces ; and himself spent the year 1296, as we have 
seen, in an invasion of Scotland, while the second expedition was despatched 
uuder his brother Edmund to Gascony. Though the Scots war was to all 
appearance completely successful, the expedition to Gascony fared little 
better than its predecessor. Free to concentrate on the French war, Edward 
called a new parliament, where the barons and the commons gave the king 
liberal support ; but to the intense indignation of every one else concerned, 
the clergy declined to contribute. 

This surprising action was the outcome of the celebrated Bull known 
as Clericis Laicos, issued by Pope Boniface VIII., forbidding the clergy to 
make contributions for secular purposes except with the permission of the 
Holy See ; an injunction which had perhaps been issued not so much with 
the object of asserting papal authority as to prevent the revenue of the 
Church from being devoted to the carrying on of war between Christian 
princes. The effect, however, was intolerable to the kings both of France 
and of England. But while it brought the Pope in direct personal colli- 
sion with Philip, the collision in England was between the king and Arch- 
bishop Winchelsea, the successor of Peckham. The Archbishop pleaded 
in vain that the clergy were ready enough to make the grant, but that their 
allegiance to the Pope forbade their doing so until they had obtained his 
permission. This doctrine, that allegiance to the Pope stood before alle- 
giance to the king, was peremptorily rejected. The king replied that unless 

I 



1 3 o NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

the clergy made a contribution of a fifth, they should be outlawed — that is to 
say, denied the protection of the civil law — and proceeded to carry the threat 
into execution. 

The clergy did not hold out long, but some of the barons who owed the 
king a grudge found their opportunity. Edward had formed an alliance 

with the Count of 
Flanders, the friend- 
ship of Flanders being 
for commercial 
reasons of great value 
to England. Edward's 
design was to throw 
a force into Flanders 
to strike at France on 
the north-east, instead 
of confining himself 
to military operations 
in Gascony itself. Of 
this force he intended 
himself to take com- 
mand, while the Con- 
stable and the Marshal, 
the Earls of Here- 
ford and Norfolk, the 
h ighes t military 
officers of the king- 
dom, were to com- 
mand in Gascony. 
Both refused flatly, 
on the ground that 
while they were 
bound to follow the 
king in person, they 
were not bound to 
go to Gascony with- 
out him. And there 
was no disputing the fact that the technical right was on their side 

Meanwhile the exigencies of the situation had driven the king to 
further arbitrary exactions. Again he had seized large quantities of wool, 
and extracted a heavy fee called a male-tolte from merchants who had been 
allowed to retain their goods. A spirit of resistance was kindled, and the 
king found clergy, barons, and commons all clamouring against him. 

Edward realised that he had placed himself in a false position, and 
nothing, perhaps, testified more completely to the real strength of his 
character than the wisdom of the concessions by which he retrieved the 




Edward I. receiving the Bull of Pope Boniface VIII. 
[From a MS. written and illuminated in Edward's reign.] 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 131 

situation without loss of dignity. As concerned the clergy, indeed, not only 
lay sentiment, but probably that of half the clergy themselves, was on his side. 
It was the clergy who gave way, not the king. The two earls having refused 
to serve in their capacity as marshal and constable, the king yielded on the 
technical question, and their places were taken by other barons. In like 
manner Edward publicly admitted that there was no feudal obligation to 
accompany him to Flanders, and offered pay for volunteer services, whereby 
he was enabled to raise an adequate force. He was at pains to pay for all 
the military supplies which had been seized, and announced that in due course 
the wool impounded should also be paid for. The North was left to look 
after Scotland, where Wallace had just raised anew the banner of insurrec- 
tion ; and the king and his army departed for Flanders, while Gascony was 
left to take care of itself. 

But even at the last moment the two recalcitrant earls presented a de- 
mand for a confirmation of the Great Charter and the Forest Charter ; 
and they made it clear that the further collection of supplies would be 
made exceedingly difficult unless their demand was conceded. They did 
not stop the king's departure, but six weeks later, when the regency which 
had been left in charge of affairs summoned a parliament, they appeared 
in arms and presented a petition which later generations interpreted as 
a statute, De Tallagio non Concedendo^ and cited practically as if it had 
been a second Charter ; it required that the claims called tallages or 
aids should not be imposed without the consent of parliament. The 
regency responded by publicly confirming the charters, to which they 
added the express inclusion of the male-tolte, though not of tallages, as 
a burden which might not be imposed except by assent. The action of 
the regency was endorsed by the king in Flanders, and this Confirmatio 
Cartarum of 1297 stands out in constitutional history as a landmark 
hardly less prominent than the issuing of the Great Charter itself or the 
calling of the Model Parliament. 

The great Flemish expedition, which had brought about the crisis, came 
to nothing from a military point of view. Philip brought up an army 
too big for the English and their allies to attack, while he was afraid him- 
self to adopt the offensive. When the kings had got tired of doing nothing 
they agreed to refer their quarrel to the Pope, in his private capacity, for 
arbitration. The enemies were reconciled ; Edward took to his second 
wife the French king's sister, while the Prince of Wales was betrothed to 
his infant daughter. Both parties tacitly dropped their allies ; and for the 
remainder of Edward's reign England and France were on terms of amity. 

Edward's return in 1298 was followed by the Falkirk campaign, but 
Scotland remained sporadically in arms. Through the winter and the 
whole of the year following Edward was much occupied with efforts to 
avoid giving effect to the Confirmation of the Charters, whereby much 
irritation was revived among both baronage and commons ; however, in the 
spring of 1300 he found himself compelled to give the royal sanction to 



1 32 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

what were known as the Articuli Super Cartas, which were in effect ad- 
ditional clauses dealing with recent grievances. But still another year 
passed before the reconciliation could be regarded as complete. Perhaps 
what conduced more than anything else to this consummation was the 
action of Archbishop Winchelsea, who supported Pope Boniface in a claim 
to interfere between England and Scotland, on the somewhat amazing ground 
that Scotland belonged to the papacy. The barons were as angry as the 
king, and a reply was returned to the Pope signed by more than a hundred 
of the lay magnates, in which he was very bluntly warned that temporal 
affairs were the king's business and not the Pope's. The remainder of the 
reign was mainly occupied with Scottish affairs, which can now be recorded 
in detail. 

V 

THE LORDSHIP OF SCOTLAND 

For a hundred years after the abrogation of the treaty of Falaise 
Scotland prospered, and had no serious collision with her southern neighbour. 
English kings had from time to time formally claimed the fealty of which 
the three Scottish kings carefully evaded any formal acknowledgment. 
After the accession of Edward I., Alexander III. in 1274, on the occasion 
of the coronation, very definitely rendered homage only for his English 
lordships. Four years later Edward again required Alexander to do homage, 
and in respect of the details the contemporary English and Scottish 
chroniclers are not in precise agreement. It is clear, however, that homage 
for the Scottish Crown was not explicitly included in the form of the oath 
which was taken by Alexander's proxy, Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick ; 
while the Scottish chronicler affirms that it was explicitly excluded. Edward, 
on the other hand, explicitly accepted the homage, reserving the right to 
claim homage for Scotland. Evidently, therefore, the whole question still 
stood precisely where it had stood at all times except during the fifteen 
years while the treaty cf Falaise was in force. 

Alexander lived and the kingdom prospered until 1286, when the king 
was killed by a fall from his horse. The sole surviving heir of his 
body was his very youthful granddaughter, Margaret, the Maid of Norway, 
the child of his daughter who had married King Eric and had died 
herself when little Margaret was born. She had been formally acknowledged 
as heir, and a regency was appointed to carry on the government until the 
child should be brought from Norway. Such a state of affairs was 
eminently conducive to the formation of parties among the nobility, since 
at any moment the succession to the throne might become an open question. 
Edward saw his opportunity, and suggested a judicious and peaceful union 
of the Crowns by the marriage of Margaret to his own youthful heir, 
Edward of Carnarvon, an arrangement which promised to be satisfactory. 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 133 

The treaty of Brigham was signed in 1290, by which it was agreed that 
if the marriage took place the laws and liberties of Scotland should be 
maintained. If heirs failed, the kingdom was to go to its " natural heir," 
and was to remain free and separate, " saving the rights of the King of 
England." 

The little queen was despatched from Norway, but was landed in the 
Orkneys only to die. The law of inheritance was exceedingly vague. In 
England itself a hundred years before, and in Normandy, it had been held 
that Richard's youngest brother stood nearer to the throne than the child 
of an intervening brother. In Scotland it was possible to hark back to 
Celtic custom, and argue that even the vague feudal rules of succession did 

THE SCOTTISH CROWN 

David I. 

I 
Henry of Huntingdon. 



Malcolm IV., 

the Maiden, 

"53- 



Alexander II 1214. 
Alexander III., 1249. 



Margaret, m. 
Eric of Norway. 

Margaret, the 

Maid of Norway, 

1285. 



William the Lion, 
1165. 



Margaret. 



Devorguilla, 
m. John Balliol. 



John Balliol, 
1292. 

I 

Edward 
Balliol. 



Margaret, m. 
John Comyn. 

I 

John (the Red) 

Comyn. 



Isabella, m. 
Robert Bruce. 



Robert Bruce, 
the Claimant. 



Robert Bruce. 



Robert I. , 
Bruce, 1306. 



David of Huntingdon. 



Ada, m. 
Henry Hastings. 

I 
Henry Hastings. 



John Hastings, 
the Claimant. 



not apply to the Crown. No fewer than thirteen claimants now came 
forward, each asserting some sort of title to the succession. Of these only 
four counted: Robert Bruce, Earl of Annandale, John Balliol, Hastings, and 
Comyn of Badenoch. All these were descended in the female line from 
David of Huntingdon, brother of William the Lion ; and all were of Norman 
families holding lordships in England as well as in Scotland. Balliol 
claimed as the grandson of David's eldest daughter. Comyn's claim 
through the same grandmother could not stand against Balliol's, but he 
also had a claim as descending from Donalbain, the brother of Malcolm 
Canmore. He, however, withdrew from the competition. Bruce claimed 
as the son of David's second daughter, and therefore as standing nearer to 
the throne than the grandson of the eldest daughter. Hastings claimed 
through the third daughter, but could only maintain that the kingdom 
should be divided among the descendants of the three sisters instead of 
going to the representative of one of them. 



i 3 4 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

The magnates appealed to the King of England to act as arbitrator. 
Edward agreed, but on condition, as he was master of the situation, 
that all parties should acknowledge his overlordship. The magnates, faced 
with a prospect not only of civil war, but of a forcible assertion of his own 
claims by Edward in the event of their refusal, accepted the situation. 
While the arbitration was proceeding Edward was to hold certain castles, 
and was to remain in possession until the award settled who the new king 
was. to be. A strong committee of investigation, mainly Scottish in its com- 
position, was appointed, and in course of time arrived at what seems the 
most obvious conclusion, that Balliol's claim was the strongest. He was 
accordingly crowned, and did homage for the Scottish kingdom. 

The Scots had probably assumed that Edward would be content with the 
formal acknowledgment of the suzerainty which all his predecessors had 
claimed and none had attempted to enforce. Neither the magnates in 
general nor the competitors in particular can be greatly blamed for yielding 
to Edward's demand ; and most of the Norman barons in Scotland, being 
in any case feudatories of Edward in respect of estates in England, had no 
inherent objection to recognising him as supreme overlord in Scotland as 
well. But when Edward made it evident that the overlordship was not to 
be a mere formality at all, the situation was changed. Appeals were carried 
from Scotland to be decided by the overlord in England, and Edward sum- 
moned feudal levies from Scotland to aid in his projected wars in France. 
Balliol was a feeble person, with no capacity for asserting himself. Two 
years after he became king the Scots virtually deposed him, and set up a 
Council of government, something after the fashion of the Provisions of 
Oxford ; while they repudiated Edward's claims, forced Balliol to the same 
course, and entered upon negotiations with Philip IV. 

Edward summoned Balliol to appear before him as a recalcitrant vassal ; 
and early in 1296, just after the Model Parliament, he appeared in arms 
on the Scottish border. Then, since Balliol did not present himself in 
answer to his summons, he fell upon Berwick and subjected its inhabitants to 
a massacre. Balliol renounced his allegiance, and Edward marched through 
Scotland, meeting with little resistance. In the summer Balliol surrendered, 
and was adjudged to have forfeited the kingdom, which by feudal law re- 
verted to the overlord : exactly as a short time before Philip IVo had declared 
Gascony to be forfeited to the French Crown. 

There should be no new King of Scotland ; a hint from Bruce, that his 
own title might now be recognised, was waved aside. Edward himself was 
to be king, and would govern through his own officers. He appointed Earl 
Warenne his Lieutenant, and Hugh Cressingham Treasurer. Nearly every 
prominent person in Scotland took the oath of fealty, and Edward withdrew 
to England to devote his whole attention to the Flanders expedition. 

Edward's probable intention was ultimately to assimilate the government 
of Scotland with that of England ; but practically the government he set up 
was a military occupation by the English ; and the English garrison be- 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 135 

haved after the arrogant fashion of conquerors. Whatever feudal magnates 
might do, the people of Scotland had no mind to submit to the tyranny of 
foreign masters : and long before Edward had departed to Flanders popu- 
lar insurrections 
were on foot, 
headed in the 
western lowlands 
by a gentleman 
named William 
Wallace, round 
whom large num- 
bersof the common 
folk promptly 
gathered. Several 
of thebarons joined 
the insurrection, 
though their atti- 
tude was habitually 
half - hearted, and 
most of them were 
to be found during 
the following years 
fighting alternately 
for and against the 
English king. 
Warenne attempted 
to suppress the 
rising ; but owing 
to his blundering 
incapacity his forces 
were cut to pieces 
by Wallace at the 
battle of Cambus- 
kenneth or Stirling 
Bridge. Except for 
two or three castles, 
the English forces 
were swept out of 
Scotland; while the 

barons of England were engaged in extorting the Confirmatio Cartarum 
from the regency which Edward, now in Flanders, had left in England. 

Wallace was the one man who had openly and uncompromisingly set 
England at defiance. He had begun his career by breaking the heads 
of English soldiers and continued it by what the English called brigandage ; 
whereas such of the barons as had joined with him were at least in no 




The battlefields of English and Scots in the 13th and 14th centuries. 



136 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

worse position than that of mere rebels against feudal authority. None of 
them was prepared openly to stand forth as leader of a revolt in the name 
of King John Balliol. Wallace, by what authority we do not know, was 
proclaimed Protector of the kingdom. But six months after Cambuskenneth 
Edward was back in England, and in July he was in Scotland with a large 
army. 

Wallace had collected a large force, though he had but few archers, and 
a mere handful of cavalry, on whom no reliance could be placed. Still, at 
Falkirk he gave battle to King Edward's host. The Scots fought after their 
own fashion, and if Edward had not drawn the moral from his Welsh wars 
the Scots would have won. Wallace massed his men in four solid bodies 
of spearmen, the formation known as the " schiltron." The few archers 
posted between the solid masses were promptly cut to pieces by the charg- 
ing English, and the cavalry incontinently took to flight. But the chivalry 
of England hurled itself against the mass of spears as vainly as the Normans 
had done at Hastings, until Edward, coming up with the main body of his 
army, advanced the archers within point-blank distance and bade them con- 
centrate their fire on particular points in the spear-hedge. The Scots could 
only stand to be shot at or break their formation and charge. Great gaps 
were made in their ranks, and into these Edward hurled his cavalry. The 
stubborn resistance was turned to a rout, and thousands of Scots were left 
dead on the field, though Wallace escaped and remained at large. 

For the moment it seemed that the battle of Falkirk was decisive. 
Edward withdrew ; but he had only effected a temporary reconciliation 
with his barons, who were still pressing to have full effect given to the Con- 
firmatio Cartarum. He was too much taken up with other affairs immedi- 
ately to organise the government in Scotland. Wallace's power was gone, 
and probably he betook himself abroad to negotiate with the King of France 
and the Pope ; but the barons, who withheld their support from a mere 
gentleman like Wallace, were more inclined to act when Wallace was out 
of the way„ Hence in the years following Falkirk there was little enough 
sign of English authority north of the Tweed, though no one knew at any 
given time which of the nobles would be posing as patriots and which as 
Edward's men a week later. Then came the Pope's intervention, which 
seemed to unite the English barons in support of Edward so far as Scotland 
was concerned. 

The prospect of an invasion of the country by Edward in person brought 
over some of the Scots nobles, including young Robert Bruce, the grandson 
of the old claimant, who at this stage of affairs appears to have changed 
sides perpetually. 

In 1303 Edward marched through Scotland, meeting with little resist- 
ance as usual ; and when he again entered Scotland with an army in 1304, 
the nobles of the national party gave up the struggle and surrendered on 
terms. Edward was ready to admit practically every one to his peace with 
the exception of William Wallace, who was back again, though without 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 137 

any recognised authority. Not long after, Wallace himself was caught, by 
vile treachery according to common tradition, carried to London, and 
hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor. Myths and legends swarm about 
the national hero who never bowed the knee to the foreign usurper. He 
was probably bloodthirsty, and he had suffered personal wrongs enough to 
make his bloodthirstiness excusable. But he stands out alone as conspicu- 
ously the one man who gave himself body and soul to the cause of Scottish 
liberty, and therefore the one who in Edward's eyes was guilty of unpardon- 
able crime. It was he and no other who inspired the people of Scotland 
with that passionate patriotism which was to bear fruit when another leader 
came to the front who had hitherto shown little enough promise of be- 
coming a national hero. 

The capture of Wallace seemed to have removed the last obstacle to the 
establishment of Edward's supremacy. Balliol was forgotten ; Bruce and 
Comyn of Badenoch, the only possible pretenders, had both come into the 
king's peace. At last, then, in 1305, Edward, at peace with France, reconciled 
with his own subjects, victor in his contest with the archbishop, was able to 
set about the organisation of the Scottish government. A constitution was 
prepared something after the Welsh precedent. Evidently it was Edward's 
intention to leave Scottish law and custom unaltered so far as was com- 
patible with the establishment of a strong central government under his own 
royal control. There was to be no general substitution of English for 
Scottish authorities after the manner of the Norman Conquest. An adminis- 
trative system was to be set up which would probably have proved excellent 
if it could only have won acceptance from the Scottish people ; if also the 
English who were planted in Scotland, forming necessary garrisons, should 
endeavour to make themselves acceptable to the natives. While revolt was 
leaderless Scotland might have time to accustom itself to the new order, to 
recognise its merits, and to settle down into a peaceable union with the 
southern kingdom. But these things were not to be. 

If a leader appeared it was still probable that the hatred of the English 
burnt into the Scots by recent events would rouse them to another effort to 
fling off the foreign supremacy. And the leader appeared immediately in 
the person of Robert Bruce. In 1306 the startling intelligence was brought 
to Edward that Bruce had met, in the church of the Grey Friars of Dumfries, 
John Comyn, who was temporarily acting for Edward as Lieutenant of 
Scotland, had quarrelled with him, and slain him before the high altar. 
Apart even from the sacrilege, the deed would have been unpardonable ; and 
Bruce had left himself no alternative save to make a desperate bid for the 
crown of an independent Scotland or to die ignominiously as a traitor. 
Probably he had already made up his mind to the former course before he 
slew Comyn, with whom he had sought the meeting in order to bring him 
over to his own cause. At any rate the deed was done, and Robert, the 
vacillating turncoat of the past, perforce transformed into the champion of 
Scottish independence, redeemed the sins and faults of his youth as the 



138 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION ~ 

indomitable and magnanimous hero who fought and won against enormous 
odds the victory of Scottish freedom. Comyn was hardly dead when 
Bruce got himself crowned by a few uncompromising supporters, declared 
himself King of Scotland, and proclaimed a war of liberation. It began un- 
promisingly enough, for the king was promptly placed under the ban of the 
Church, and the whole of the Comyn kin was roused against him. The 
few bold adherents who at once collected were routed by a superior force 
at Methven. He himself became a fugitive ; two of his brothers were 
captured and beheaded, and his wife and daughter also fell into the hands 
of the English. Bruce passed the winter in hiding, but with the spring he 
reappeared in his own earldom of Carrick, where he began an energetic 
system of raiding diversified by hairbreadth escapes ; while Edward was 
collecting a large army in the north of England to crush Scottish resistance 
once and for all. A victory in the open field at Loudon Hill over an English 
force under Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, brought new adherents to 
the adventurer. But Edward's own army of conquest was on the point of 
crossing the Border when the great king died at Burgh-on-Sands. His 
bones were carried back to Westminster, and his tomb bears the significant 
inscription, Malleus Scotorum, " The Hammer of the Scots." 



VI 

ASPECTS OF THE POLICY OF EDWARD I 

We have seen that Edward's policy during the first twenty years of his 
reign tended to restrict the individual powers of the great nobles. This was 
the effect of the legislation from the Statute of Gloucester to Quia Emptores. 
A like effect was produced by the conquest of Wales, so far as the Marcher 
earldoms were concerned ; since it was no longer necessary to concede to 
the earls that freedom of action which in practice was required so long as it 
could be pleaded that the Marches were virtually in a persistent state of war. 
The same sort of policy was observed by Edward during the remainder of 
his reign. When Gloucester and Hereford attempted to assert their tradi- 
tional authority, they were promptly taught that their independence had 
disappeared with the disappearance of its raison d'etre; and that was the 
main cause of Hereford's subsequent attitude of persistent opposition to the 
king. 

Edward, however, sought to strengthen the Crown as against the great 
feudatories in another way, by the absorption of great estates into the 
lordship of the royal house. First Gloucester, and afterwards Hereford's 
successor, were compelled, willingly or unwillingly, to marry two of the 
king's daughters, so that the earls of the next generation were both of the 
blood royal. The third member of the baronage who had stood in conspi- 
cuous opposition to the king was Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. His estates 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 139 

were entailed on the heirs of his body ; and since he was childless, they 
passed on his death to the Crown. In like manner Cornwall lapsed to the 
Crown on the death of its earl, the king's cousin. Thomas of Lancaster, 
Edward's nephew, held three earldoms, to which two more were ultimately 
added by his marriage to the daughter of the Earl of Lincoln. The imme- 
diate effect was to secure a great preponderance for the blood royal among 
the greater barons. The same policy with the same end in view was 
pursued by the king's grandson, Edward III. ; although, as we shall presently 
find, it subsequently bore fruit of a very different kind from that which had 
been intended. 

In the second place, the king aimed at procuring authority for pronounce- 
ments which should secure to him beyond cavil powers of raising money 
without a direct appeal to the goodwill of his subjects. To that end his 
statutes defined feudal aids and expressly authorised the levying of the 
" Great and Ancient Customs," the fixed tax on exported wool. But he was 
in no haste to procure definitions which expressly limited his powers of ex- 
action, and tried his hardest to avoid formal ratifications of the Charters in 
terms which expressly required the assent of parliament to various imposts 
such as the tallages which had from time to time been levied from the 
towns. The tallages, as we have seen, were not formally surrendered by him 
in his Confirmation of the Charters, despite the petition of the barons which 
was subsequently treated as a statute. In effect, Edward devised or applied 
various means of raising money, to which exception was taken sooner or 
later as contravening the principle that only specified taxes might be raised 
without parliament's consent. Thus under pressure of circumstances the 
king seized the wool of the merchants, or war supplies, as being within the 
prerogative of the Crown, though of his grace he consented to compensate 
the sufferers for their losses. Long custom treated an estate of a certain 
value as being a knight's holding ; and on it he based a decree that every 
one in possession of such a holding must take up knighthood, and pay the 
feudal fee on taking up knighthood, on pain of a heavy fine. He made, at 
the very close of his reign, a bargain with the foreign merchants, in accord- 
ance with which he of his own authority imposed what were afterwards called 
the New and Small Customs as opposed to the Great and Ancient Customs 
— additional taxes on exported goods. On occasion, instead of applying to 
parliament, he bargained with separate sections of the community for par- 
ticular grants. Hardly any of these methods were decisively challenged 
at the time ; but all later provided bones of contention between Crown and 
parliament when parliament learnt to think of financial control as a means 
to the control of policy and administration. 

Apart from these various sources of supply, legitimate or otherwise, 
English kings in the past had been in the habit of meeting financial emer- 
gencies by borrowing ; and the source from which alone they could borrow 
was the Jewish community. The ethical standard upheld by the medieval 
Church forbade Christian men the practice of usury, that is, of lending 



1 4 o NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

money at interest. The Jews recognised no such moral restriction, and 
as a body they derived their wealth not from trading but from financing 
their neighbours. Socially they were outside the pale ; but the kings of 
England gensrally took them under their own protection, because they 
were a useful source from which the Crown could obtain supplies upon 
reasonable terms, as their protector. That proviso did not apply to 
private persons who found themselves driven to borrowing ; and the Jews 
were detested both on the ground of religious prejudice and as extortioners. 
Perhaps the most popular act of Edward was his expulsion of the Jews 
from England ; a measure which, while it gratified popular prejudice, 
appeared to be conspicuously disinterested because the Crown thereby 
deprived itself of the source from which it had hitherto been able to borrow 




A 13th century caricature upon the Jews of Norwich. 
[From the Jews' Roll in the Public Record Office.] 

on emergency. But in fact Edward found a substitute for the Jews. The 
great commercial houses of the cities of northern Italy had already developed 
a financial business, in spite of ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury, which 
had deprived the Jews of their monopoly; and the expulsion of the Jews 
made room for the Lombards and Florentines. The Crown in fact probably 
lost little by the exchange. 

Before the time of King Edward the development of national commerce 
had not presented itself to the kings as an object of policy. The mere 
expansion of trade developed the consciousness of common interests as 
opposed to merely local interests among the English producers, and so 
fostered that national idea which was so prominent in Edward's own. mind ; 
and a similar notion is latent in Edward's habit of negotiating with mer- 
cantile groups in preference to individual boroughs. 

These beginnings, however, of the nationalisation of commerce went 
on side by side with the development of the corporate life of the boroughs 
themselves, both being encouraged by the final recognition of borough 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 141 

representatives as an element of the national parliament. And here we 
may note in the boroughs, beside the gilds-merchant, the growth of the 
craft-gilds, to which the authority of the gilds-merchant was gradually 
transferred. The craft-gilds were associations of the members of the 
separate trades or crafts ; and we must not be led by modern analogies 
to imagine that they consisted of handworkers in opposition to capitalist 
employers. In the thirteenth century the trader was a master craftsman 
who was already a free burgess. He might or might not have journeymen 
and apprentices in his employ, but in any case he was practically certain 
to be a worker himself. And every apprentice and nearly every journeyman 
looked forward to the time when he should himself become a master crafts- 
man and a burgess. There was no active antagonism between employer 
and employed when the employed looked upon himself as an employer 
in the making. Nor was there direct antagonism between the gild-merchant 
and the craft-gild, because the master craftsman was of necessity a member 
of the gild-merchant — seeing that if he were not so he could not carry 
on his trade. In the main, the substitution of the leading craft-gilds for 
the gild-merchant as the local authority for the regulation of trade was 
not the outcome of the struggle between rival organisations but merely 
a matter of practical administrative convenience. 

The national idea was, as we have seen, only in embryo, and the commercial 
idea of breeding and accumulating wealth was only in embryo. Commerce 
was practically the local exchange of goods of which there happened to 
be a superfluity, for goods of which there happened to be a deficiency, 
and the local producer was extremely jealous of the competition of the 
outside producer, whom he called a " foreigner." But Edward saw in 
the development of a national commerce a means not only to increasing 
the material prosperity of his subjects, but also to filling the royal exchequer. 
By increasing the volume of exports and imports, the produce of the 
customs, new or old, would be proportionately increased. The superior 
quality of certain English products, notably wool and hides and some other 
raw materials, had created a demand for them on the Continent, notably for 
the looms of Flanders. The export was to be encouraged ; and Edward 
sought to concentrate it at particular ports, partly because the trade could 
thereby be better supervised in the interests of the traders, and partly 
because the customs could be more easily collected in 4he interests of 
the Crown. 

VII 

ROBERT BRUCE 

The death of Edward I. put an entirely new complexion upon the pros- 
pect of Scottish independence. The old king had made up his mind to 
punish the fresh revolt with an iron hand and to bring Scotland under his 



i 4 2 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

heel. A successor of the same quality as himself might have carried out 
his plan, though it may be doubted whether he could have effected a perma- 
nent pacification of Scotland. But Edward II. was of an altogether different 
type. Devoid of patriotic or kingly ambition, the young Edward had little 
thought except for his amusements and the gratification or the wealth of the 
favourites by whom he was surrounded. Moreover, as often happens with 
a masterful ruler, the great Edward had been served, latterly at least, by men 
who were efficient instruments for executing his will but were not capable 
of relieving his successor of the responsibilities of government. So instead 
of carrying out his father's plans, Edward II. contented himself with a mere 
military parade, dropped the conquest of Scotland, left its government in 
charge of the Earl of Pembroke, and retired to England. No one* troubled 
about Scotland, since the whole of the baronage immediately found them- 
selves entirely taken up with the personal rivalries and jealousies which 
were let loose by the conduct of the new king. 

So Bruce continued his raiding, held in check only by the various castles 
which the policy of the first Edward had filled with English garrisons, and 
by the hostility of nobles who were either involved in the blood-feud with 
the Comyns or, for one cause or another, were irrevocably committed to the 
English side. Those who were not so committed either sat still and awaited 
events, or, as one success after another attended the arms of the adventurer 
and the band of brilliant fighting men who had attached themselves to him, 
became open adherents of King Robert. Each new feat of arms achieved 
by the king himself or his brother Edward, by James Douglas or Thomas 
Randolph, Earl of Moray, brought in fresh supporters ; while no similar 
successes attended the English, who sat sullenly in their castles until one 
after another was surprised, and, being captured, was levelled with the 
ground. For the Scots could not afford to lock up their own fighting men 
to garrison the castles, nor would they run the risk of their being reoccupied 
by the English. 

In 13 1 o Edward was stirred up to lead an invasion into Scotland ; but 
he found no one to fight, the country was laid waste before him, and he 
retired in inglorious discomfiture. In 1311 and 13 12 the Scots took the 
offensive and raided the northern counties of England. Then Perth was 
surprised in January 1313, and Roxburgh a year later, by Bruce himself and 
by Lord James Douglas respectively. Before Easter Randolph had surprised 
Edinburgh, scaling the precipitous rock by night. Stirling had already been 
invested, and was now the only fortress of importance which remained in 
English hands ; moreover the commandant had pledged himself to surrender 
unless he were relieved by the Midsummer Day ensuing. 

The fall of Stirling would mean that the last fragment of Edward I.'s 
conquest of Scotland would vanish. Even Edward II. awoke to the neces- 
sity for action. A superficial reconciliation had just been effected between 
the king and his barons ; and, though some of them still declined to join 
him in person on a Scottish campaign undertaken without the express 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 143 

sanction of parliament, he led a mighty army across the border in June 13 14, 
magnificent in equipment and attended by a vast baggage train. He had 
a short week in which to reach Stirling before the hour should arrive when 
it was pledged to surrender unless relieved. The great host rolled to the 
north-westward in a hasty and ill-managed march. King Robert knew that 
the crucial hour had come, and posted his comparatively small force on a 
carefully selected position, the field of Bannockburn, covering the immediate 
approach to Stirling. Wal- 




lace had staked all on the 
field of Falkirk, which had 
come near to being adecisive 
victory for the Scots. Bruce 
himself had been present at 
that battle, and fully under- 
stood how itwas that Edward 
had turned it into a decisive 
English victory. Falkirk 
was not to be repeated at 
Bannockburn, since Bruce 
rightly calculated that there 
was with the English army 
no commander possessing 
the large experience and 
the technical resource of 
Edward I. It was a moral 
certainty that the English, 
with their huge force of 
men-at-arms, would rely 
upon the customary medie- 
val tactics, and endeavour 
to crush the Scottish in- 
fantry by the shock of 

charging squadrons. He himself must rely, like Wallace, upon the stub- 
born valour of his footmen ; since he, like Wallace, had no masses of 
cavalry and few archers. Therefore he had to guard against the pos- 
sibility of having his flank turned, and against a repetition of the archery 
tactics. 

The position chosen gave Bruce what he needed, a narrow front where 
his soldiery could be massed, with broken and boggy ground on the flanks 
which secured them from being turned. Boggy ground on the front itself 
would minimise the shock of the charge ; and where it was not boggy it was 
carefully prepared with the iron spikes called calthrops, and with covered 
pits, so as to produce a similar effect. The bulk of Bruce's cavalry too were 
dismounted, and disposed so as to strengthen the line of infantry, while only 
a picked squadron was retained to strike suddenly and swiftly when occasion 



Plan of battle of Bannockburn. 



English main body. 



Ej English archers. 



Scottish forces. 



Scottish horse. 



i 4 4 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

should arise. The Scots were outnumbered by more than three to one, but 
on the field the English could not bring their numbers into play. 

Such was Bruce's plan. When the advancing hosts of the English 
appeared, the incidents of the day gave a foretaste of the coming struggle. 
A detachment of English horse made a dash round the Scottish flank in 
order to reach Stirling and effect the technical relief. A detachment of 
Scottish foot was just in time to intercept it and drive it back in rout. An 
English knight, Henry de Bohun, seeing the Scottish king riding almost un- 
armed along the Scottish line, charged down upon him. At the critical 
instant Robert swerved his palfrey, and as De Bohun crashed by, clove his 
skull with his battle-axe. 

On the following day the battle went precisely as Bruce had designed. 
The masses of mail-clad horsemen were hurled against the Scottish front, 
crashing vainly upon the serried spears. The archers were thrown forward 
on the left, but no steps were taken to cover them, and almost with the first 
flight of the arrows the small squadron of Scottish horse burst upon their 
flank and cut them to pieces. With repeated charges, the English horse 
became a huddled, unmanageable mass ; the Scottish infantry rolled forward 
in unbroken line; a band of camp followers descending the neighbouring 
Gillies' Hill was mistaken for a fresh Scottish host ; and the great English 
army broke in a panic rout. Never had the English met with a disaster so 
overwhelming ; the fugitives were slain in heaps, though the small supply 
of cavalry made the pursuit only desultory. Numbers of prisoners and vast 
spoils fell to the conquerors. 

On the field of Bannockburn the independence of Scotland was de- 
cisively won, though fourteen years were still to pass before England 
acknowledged the fact by the treaty of Northampton. During those four- 
teen years the Scots became the aggressors. Berwick, the only corner of 
Scottish soil still held by the English, was captured ; and year after year 
Douglas and Randolph harried the north of England, while the unfailing 
misrule in the southern country prevented any organised effort to retrieve 
what had been lost. Edward himself had been murdered, and his queen 
Isabella with her paramour Mortimer were ruling England in the name of 
young Edward III., when the government at last bowed to the logic of facts, 
and the treaty of Northampton acknowledged Robert Bruce as king of the 
independent Scottish nation. But the great liberator's life was already 
drawing to a close, and a year later he died, leaving the crown to his son 
David II., a child of six years old. 

A curious episode followed the battle of Bannockburn. For nearly a 
hundred and fifty years the King of England had been titular lord of Ireland. 
Within the small group of counties known as the English Pale, English 
government and English law and customs prevailed. Outside the Pale the 
north of Ireland remained almost entirely Celtic, the De Burghs, the Earls 
of Ulster, being almost the only great Norman family. But, in the south, 
Norman families, most notably the Geraldines and the Butlers, extended 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 145 

their dominions and ruled almost as independent princes ; very much Celti- 
cised in their sympathies though retaining some of their Norman traditions. 
Outside the Pale the central government was practically powerless. After 
Bannockburn, the O'Neills and O'Connells, the most powerful of the northern 
clans, offered the crown of Ireland to Robert Bruce. That shrewd prince 
declined, but the proposal to substitute his brother Edward was accepted. 
The Bruces went over to Ireland to win the crown, and obtained a very 
general support from the native chiefs. The Normans, however, stood by their 
fealty, and while the Bruces were victorious in the field, they were unable to 
reduce the Norman strongholds. Still Edward Bruce got himself crowned 
King of Ireland, and was left by his brother to establish himself in his king- 
dom. His reign was brief, for a vigorous English governor arrived in the 
person of Roger Mortimer. In a fight at Dundalk Edward was defeated and 
slain, and Ireland thereafter was more or less reduced to submission ; but if 
the episode had any permanent effect, it was to diminish rather than extend 
the authority of the central government ; and the efforts of the English lieu- 
tenants were still mainly directed to vain attempts to prevent the Celticising 
of the English in Ireland. 



VIII 
EDWARD II 

From the English point of view Bannockburn was merely the most 
disastrous incident in a reign which presents us with no incident and no 
character that Englishmen can think of with pride or respect. When it 
has been recorded that Edward of Carnarvon was not a bloodthirsty tyrant, 
or personally vicious, there is nothing left to be said in his favour. He 
lacked even the personal valour in which his grandfather, Henry III., was 
not deficient, as well as the intellectual sympathies and the personal piety 
which were at least amiable traits in that monarch's character. He is 
redeemed from unmitigated contempt rather than from positive execration 
mainly by his tragic end. 

His grim father's bQdy was hardly cold when the young king was already 
doing his best to make havoc of his policy. His first step was to recall 
to court his boon companion, the young Gascon knight, Piers Gaveston, 
whom his father had banished as being no fit companion for the heir 
to the English throne. Gaveston's sole merit lay in the beauty of person, 
the frivolous wit, the showy accomplishments, and the superficial cleverness 
which had conquered the affections of the young Edward ; who now made 
haste to marry him to his niece and endow him with the earldom of 
Cornwall, which had recently passed to the Crown by escheat. There was 
a general ejection of the old king's officials, who were largely replaced by 
men whom Edward I. had conspicuously distrusted. There was no im- 

K 



THE LANCASTERS 
Henry III. 



Edward I. , 1272. 

Edward II. , 1307. 

I 
Edward III. , 1327. 



Edmund Crouchback. 



I 

Thomas of 

Lancaster 

(executed by 

Edward II.). 



The Black Prince. 

I 
Richard II. , 

1377. 



Lionel of 
Clarence. 



House of 
York. 



I 
John of Gaunt, 

m. Blanche 
of Lancaster. 

I 
Henry IV., 

1399- 



Henry of 
Lancaster. 

I 

Henry of 

Lancaster. 



.- Blanche, m. 
John of Gaunt. 



146 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

mediate opposition. The baronage had had little enough sympathy with 
the masterful monarch whose strong hand had been removed by death, and 
were content to await events. If the young king tried to play the part 
of Rehoboam, he was not likely to fare any better than his prototype. 

With the turn of the year, Edward proceeded to France to espouse the 
youthful bride, Isabella, to whom he was betrothed. He left the regency 
in the hands of the new Earl of Cornwall, but no open dissatisfaction was 
yet expressed. Within two months, however, of Edward's return and corona- 
tion, the simmering 
wrath of the barons 
hadreachedboiling- 
point. Themocking 
tongue of the Gas- 
con upstart was not 
to be endured. The 
old Earl of Lincoln 
and the young Earl 
of Gloucester, both 
loyal adherents of 
the Crown, were 
drawn into the circle 
j of disgusted opposi- 

tion. A parliament, 
of the baronage only, met in April, and unanimously demanded that Gaveston 
should be banished and deprived of his new earldom ; while the bishops, 
headed by Winchelsea, threatened him with excommunication. The king, 
finding himself helpless, sent Gaveston off to Ireland as Lieutenant. Twelve 
months after the parliament of barons, Edward's need of supplies caused 
the summoning of another parliament of the three Estates. The Estates 
at once drew up and presented a schedule of grievances ; and by pro- 
mises to remedy these the king secured from the magnates their assent 
to the recall of Gaveston — always excepting the implacable Guy, Earl of 
Warwick, whom the favourite had nicknamed the Black Dog of Arden. 

But Gaveston was as irritating, and the administration through the 
king's favourites as incompetent, as ever. Again within twelve months the 
parliament of the barons took matters into their own hands. They met 
in arms. They demanded unanimously the banishment of Gaveston. But 
they went very much further ; reverting to the precedent of the Mad 
Parliament of 1258, they demanded that the government should be placed 
in the hands of a committee of magnates. They set forth the grievances 
of the realm. Like their predecessors fifty-two years before, they ignored 
the assembly of the Estates, and claimed in effect that a baronial oligarchy 
should perform the functions of an absolute monarchy. Backed as they 
were by the whole feudal force, and probably by the whole popular senti- 
ment, of the nation, the king could offer them no resistance ; and after 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 147 

the precedent of the Provisions of Oxford, a committee of twenty-one 
" Lords Ordainers " was appointed, with full powers of government for 
eighteen months. Seven bishops, eight earls, and six barons made up what 
may be called the Committee of Reform. They did not immediately strike 
at Gaveston, but — at first, at least — endeavoured seriously to deal with some 
of the more serious ills of the administration. 

Edward spent the latter part of the year in an abortive expedition to 
Scotland. Then Lincoln, the last of the old king's trusted servants, and the 
most powerful influence among the barons on the side of 
moderation, died ; and Thomas of Lancaster, the king's 
first cousin, now lord of five earldoms, became indisput- 
ably the head of the baronage. About Midsummer the 
Ordainers had completed their scheme of reform, which 
was then submitted to a parliament of the three Estates. 
Various laws in the Statute Book were to be properly 
enforced. The " New Customs " were to be abolished. 
All officers of State both in England and in Gascony 
were to be appointed by counsel and consent of the 
barons, and a baronial parliament was to be summoned 
once or twice annually. War and peace, even the king's 
personal movements as well as every department of 
government, were to be under the control of the barons. 
Gaveston and all his kinsfolk and following were to be 
banished ; so were the Lombards and Florentines who 
had become the financial agents of the Crown. 

Gaveston departed, but early in 13 12 he was back 
again in the north of England, and in the king's company. Five of the 
earls, Lancaster, Pembroke, Hereford, Arundel, and Warwick, joined by 
Warenne, who was not one of the Ordainers, took up arms to enforce the 
Ordinances of the previous year and to hunt down Gaveston, None took 
the king's side. Gaveston surrendered to Pembroke and Warrene, under 
promise of protection ; his fate was to be submitted to the decision of 
parliament. But while Gaveston was travelling south in Pembroke's 
custody, Warwick captured him, and in conjunction with Lancaster, Here- 
ford, and Arundel, cut off his head on Blacklow Hill. 

This violent action split up the Ordainers. Pembroke, and in a less 
degree Warenne, felt that their honour was implicated. The young Earl of 
Gloucester had always been opposed to extreme action. The king's hand 
being thus strengthened, the four earls who had been responsible for 
Gaveston's death presently submitted to a form of reconciliation and 
amnesty which was ratified at the end of 13 13. 

The reconciliation was celebrated by Edward's great invasion of Scot- 
land, which ended with the huge catastrophe of Bannockburn, where 
Gloucester was killed and Hereford was taken prisoner. But Hereford was 
exchanged for the ladies of Bruce's family, who had been held prisoners 




Housewife, early 14th 
century. 




148 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

in England ever since 1306. The disaster was a political triumph for 
Lancaster's faction. Lancaster at once became the most powerful man 
in the realm, and had he been a real statesman, or even a tolerably 
competent administrator, he would now have had a magnificent opportunity. 
He was neither the one nor the other, and anarchy reigned from end to end 
of the kingdom. His supporters fell away ; and Pembroke, who had never 
forgiven the Gaveston affair, devoted himself to forming a middle party, 
which acquired a definite ascendency in 13 18 and gave the country a less 

desperately anarchical government for some three 
years. More could scarcely be said for it. 

But Edward was incapable of learning wis- 
dom. He had found a new favourite in Hugh 
Despenser, the son of an official of some capacity. 
Honours were bestowed on the Despensers, who 
soon raised up enemies. The magnates united 
to demand their banishment in 1 321, when the 
demand was endorsed by a parliament of the 
three Estates. But the union Was only superficial. 
On the one hand, Hereford and Roger Mortimer 
of Wigmore, the head of the Mortimer connection, 
the bitterest foes of the Despensers, were sus- 
picious of the king's intention of recalling the 
favourites. On the other hand, an insult to the 
queen produced a strong reaction in the king's favour. He ventured to 
recall the Despensers, whereupon the Marchers and Lancaster rose. 
Edward marched to the north ; the Lancastrians were routed by Sir 
Andrew Harclay, Commandant of Carlisle, at Boroughbridge ; Lancaster 
himself was taken, and was sentenced and executed without being allowed 
to defend himself. The vagaries of popular sentiment transformed into a 
hero and a miracle-working saint this most powerful of the barons, who 
in his public life had displayed no single virtue which entitled him to the 
smallest respect. 

The king and the Despensers had won for the time ; and the Despensers 
posed as champions of popular as opposed to baronial rights ; an attitude 
traditionally appropriate to the descendants of a Despenser who had received 
the confidence of Simon de Montfort. A parliament was promptly called 
at York, in which the commons were fully represented. The Ordinances 
were repealed, but the principle was asserted that affairs of state should be 
treated by the king in full parliament of the prelates, the baronage, and 
commonalty. In effect the Ordainers were condemned, not for what they 
did, but for doing it without the authority of the assembled Estates. 

The Despensers proved no better than any of the series of inefficient 
administrations under which England had suffered for fourteen years past. 
They in their turn drove into opposition those of the great nobles whose 
temper inclined them to moderate counsels. Such a man was Henry of 



Costume of the commonalty, 
Edward II. 



in 



NATIONALISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 149 

Lancaster, the brother and in part the successor of Thomas. The queen, 
Isabella — a quite young woman, who had been but sixteen when in 131 2 
she became the mother of the future Edward III. — 
was violently jealous of the young Despenser's in- 
fluence with her husband, and the humiliations to 
which she was subjected would have awakened bitter 
resentment in a far less passionate woman. The 
Scots raided at will over the northern counties, and 
were only bought off by an ignominious but practi- 
cally unavoidable truce. There prevailed every- 
where the disorder and insecurity which in medieval 
times inevitably accompanied a weak government. 
In France, Charles IV., the last king of the old 
direct line of the Capets, was carrying out the old 
policy of his father, Philip IV., and re-establishing in 
Gascony the authority which that monarch had 
niched from the first Edward but had surrendered 
in the closing years of his reign. 

By a master-stroke of impolicy, Isabella was 
allowed to go to France to negotiate with her 
brother ; thither she was followed by the boy 
Edward, who now bore the title of Duke of Aquitaine. 
But while the queen played at diplomacy, she was 
more occupied in a private intrigue with Roger 
Mortimer, who had been imprisoned after Borough- 
bridge but had made his escape to France. The 
fruits of that notorious intrigue were made mani- 
fest when Isabella and Mortimer landed in England 
in the autumn of 1326, announcing that they had 
come to remove the now generally hated De- 
spensers. For the king and his favourites scarcely 
a hand was raised, while nobles and gentry flocked 
to the queen's standard. The king became a 
fugitive, but was captured along with the younger 
Despenser, who was forthwith put to death. Edward 
himself was held in honourable custody by Henry 
of Lancaster. In January a parliament of the three 
Estates met, and was invited to pronounce whether 
it would have for king Edward of Carnarvon or 
his son, the Duke of Aquitaine. It pronounced in 
favour of the boy. The king was forced to abdicate, 
and Edward III. was proclaimed and crowned. 
The fallen monarch was withdrawn from the charge 
of Henry of Lancaster and placed in that of new custodians. When the 
brutal treatment to which he was now subjected failed to kill him, he was 



® 



Brass of Sir John de Creke, 1325. 



150 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

foully murdered in Berkeley Castle. As in the case of Thomas of Lancaster, 
not his virtues but the sins of his enemies and the tragedy of his death 
transformed the murdered king into a popular saint. 

Practically, though not nominally, the government passed into the hands 
of the queen and her paramour, Roger Mortimer, who was now created Earl 
of March. They also did evil in the sight of the nation. An attack on 
Scotland met with the now familiar fate of such attempts. The regency 
gave up the futile struggle and disgusted the entire nation by the treaty of 
Northampton, which acknowledged Scottish independence. The little Prince 
David was married to the little English Princess Joan. A year later Robert 
Bruce died, and for a short time the Scottish regency was placed in the 
capable hands of Randolph, Earl of Moray. 

But Mortimer in England, supported by the besotted queen mother, 
had no immediate aim save the accumulation of vast estates in his own 
hands. A conspiracy was set on foot for the overthrow of the regency 
and the release of the young King Edward from a state of practical sub- 
jection. The boy had been married to Philippa of Hainault, and the birth 
of a son in 1330, when he was seventeen, made him realise that he had 
come to man's estate. He joined with the conspirators, who on a night 
in October were privily admitted into Nottingham Castle, where Mortimer, 
the queen mother, and the young king were lying. Mortimer was seized, 
despatched to London, and hanged. Isabella was sent into an honourable 
retirement — honourable so far as concerned her treatment. Almost four 
years after his coronation Edward III. became King of England in fact 
as well as in name. 




Opening a joust in the 14th century. 



CHAPTER VI 
EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II 
I 

BEFORE THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 

Robert Bruce had achieved the liberation of Scotland, and had organised 
a government which was effective so long as he lived, supported by the 
able and patriotic captains who had helped him to his triumph. But he 
had left the seeds of trouble, by the forfeiture of the estates of sundry 
Norman nobles who had failed to support his cause. Moreover, he left 
on the throne a six-year-old son by a marriage in his later years, though 
his elder daughter Margaret was the wife of the hereditary Steward of 
Scotland. The government was safe in the hands 
of the Regent Randolph ; but the prospect if 
he should die was not too promising. The 
disinherited no'bles, and in particular Edward 
Balliol, the son of the old King John, were 
eager to find an opportunity for their own 
reinstatement. In 1332 Randolph died, leaving 
no one with the ability to take his place ade- 
quately. Edward Balliol at once struck for 
the Crown, supported by the " disinherited " 
and by many of the Border lords. A force 
sailed from England- — it was not allowed to 
make an invasion across the Border — landed 
on the coast of Fife, and at Dupplin Moor routed 
a large army collected by the new regent, the Earl of Mar. The victory 
was achieved by the combination of archers, this time, with foot soldiers 
massed after the fashion of the Scots themselves ; while the blunder of 
Bannockburn, which had there exposed the archery to destruction by the 
attack of a small body of horse, was not repeated. Dupplin Moor was 
decisive for the moment, and Edward Balliol was crowned. Three months 
later he was a fugitive ; but in the interval he as King of Scots had made 
a new treaty with England. This Edward was pleased to regard as 
cancelling the treaty of Northampton ; and thenceforward, till the course 
of events turned his attention from Scotland altogether, he gave active 
support to the pretensions of Balliol. In the following year (1333) he 

151 




Edward III. and St. George. 
[National Portrait Gallery.] 



152 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

led an army into Scotland, and Dupplin Moor was repeated at Halidon Hill. 
The tactics here developed, out of those employed at Falkirk and Maes 
Madog, were destined to make the English arms invincible for a century 
to come whenever they were brought into play. 

Balliol was now again King of Scots, placed on the throne emphatically 
by the English arms ; and he forthwith handed over half the Lowlands to 
the King of England, to whom he also did homage for the rest of the 
kingdom. The Sects declined to accept the situation. They sent off 
David and his wife Joan, the king and queen whom they recognised, to 
France for safety, and despite the lack of a leader prepared to fight. The 
Disinherited, replaced in their estates, proceeded to quarrel. Instead of 
fostering and strengthening Edward Balliol, Edward of England treated 
him with ostentatious distrust. In spite of annual incursions on the part 




A royal dinner party in the 14th century. 



of the English, continued until 1336, Balliol's cause gained no ground; 
the Scots avoided any pitched battles with the invaders, and reverted 
to the guerilla warfare so successfully practised by Robert Bruce and his 
captains ; and in 1338 Edward's attention was finally absorbed by France 
so completely as to forbid the idea of his again attempting effective interven- 
tion in Scotland. A year later Balliol himself was ejected, and in 1341 
David returned to his kingdom as its acknowledged monarch. 

For England itself these were years of recovery from the endless broils, 
revolutions, and counter-revolutions under which the country had been 
suffering ever since the death of Edward I. The most prominent incident, 
if it may be called an incident, is the record that in 1332 and 1333 the 
knights of the shire became definitely associated with the borough represen- 
tatives in a House of Commons, instead of with the barons, in the parliament 
of the three Estates ; though the time when the clergy ceased to act as an 
Estate of parliament is uncertain. 

But in France events were taking place which were leading up to the 



Philip III., 1270. 



Philip IV., the Fair, 
1285. 



Charles of Valois. 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 153 

outbreak of the Hundred Years' War. In 1328 the French King, Charles IV., 
died ; like his brothers, leaving no son behind him. A child born post- 
humously proved to be a daughter. From the days of Hugh Capet, the 
first of the reigning line, son had invariably succeeded father except when, 

failing a son, a 
THE FRENCH CROWN brother had suc- 

ceeded. There had 
been no female 
succession, or suc- 
cession through a 
female. The 
French now as- 
sumed the prin- 
ciple of the male 
succession, and 
forthwith acknow- 
ledged as king Philip of Valois, the nephew of Philip IV. and first cousin 
of the three brothers who had reigned since that king's death. 

Now no one disputed the doctrine that a woman was not herself eligible 
for the throne ; but laws of succession had not been definitely and decisively 
formulated ; they varied in different countries and in different parts of one 
country ; and there was a custom quite familiar in France, by which the 



Louis X. , 
I3I4- 

I 
Joan of Navarre. 

I 

Charles the Bad 

of Navarre 

{born 1332). 



Philip V., 
1316. 



Charles IV., 
1322. 



Isabella, m. 
Edward II. 

I 
Edward III. 



Philip VI. 

of Valois, 

1328. 




Edward III. meets his Cousin of France, Philip VI., in 1331. 

[From a 14th century MS. in the British Museum.] 

succession to an estate might pass on to the son of a woman who was 
herself precluded from the succession by her sex. Accordingly, when Charles 
IV. died, .his sister Isabella, the queen mother of England, made a formal 
claim in favour of her son, as being nearer to the throne than his cousin of 
Valois. There was nothing absurd or irregular about the claim, which was 
based upon one of the recognised customary grounds of succession. But 
it practically rested with the French nation to choose at this stage which of 



i 5 4 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

the various customs prevalent should be adopted in deciding permanently 
the course of succession to the French throne. They did not greatly trouble 
themselves over the technical pleas with which lawyers subsequently amused 
themselves ; but finding that their choice lay practically between the first 
noble of France and the king of a foreign country, they did not for a 
moment hesitate in choosing Philip. It is not without interest in this con- 
nection to notice that, a century and a half later, Henry VII. claimed the 
throne of England through his mother, but for himself, not for her ; and 
although succession in the female line, was maintained, it was held until the 
reign of Henry VIII. to be a matter of doubt whether a woman could in her 
own person succeed to the throne. 

In 1328 Isabella's claim on behalf of her son was rejected by the French 
baronage, and was unsupported even by the barons of Aquitaine. It is to 
be observed, however, that even at this stage the cities of Flanders, whose 
Count was a vassal of the French Crown, were prepared for reasons of their 
own to support Edward's title. War on this account was, however, out of 
the question ; Edward accepted the accomplished fact, and did homage to 
Philip for his French possessions ; and outwardly the two kings became 
very good friends. Nevertheless two bones of contention remained. Philip 
would not abandon his friendly attitude to the Bruces, and gave young 
David shelter in his court when Edward Balliol was reigning as de facto King 
of Scotland. Also the conflicting rights of the King of France and of 
Edward, as Duke of Aquitaine, remained unsettled. The differences, in fact, 
over Aquitahie were such that they could hardly in any case have been settled 
except by the arbitrament of war. There was no reconciling the irreducible 
minimum of the respective claims. So in 1336 Edward was already en- 
gaged in diplomatic efforts to secure the alliance of the Counts of the 
Netherlands, Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, and others, and of the German 
Emperor Lewis of Bavaria himself. At the end of 1337, Edward renounced 
the homage which he had rendered while still a minor to Philip, and again 
put forward his own claim to the French Crown. Hostilities of an informal 
character opened with conflicts in the Channel and on the Channel coasts 
between the seamen of England and of Normandy. In 1338 Edward had 
secured Brabant, and 'his alliance with the German Emperor was ostenta- 
tiously established. In 1339 the long-drawn-out preliminaries came to an 
end, and the contest known as the Hundred Years' War was fairly joined. 



II 

THE ERA OF VICTORIES 

The old idea that the Hundred Years' War was a piece of wanton aggres* 
sion on the part of King Edward, having for its object the usurpation of the 
French Crown, has long been abandoned. The real point at issue, the 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 155 

matter which made war inevitable, was the question of Aquitaine ; over 
which Edward I. and Philip the Fair had wrangled at the end of the last 
century. A settlement had then been arrived at which outwardly satisfied 
both parties ; but during the incapable rule of Edward II. the French kings 
had continued the old insidious policy of procuring and acting upon excuses 
for confiscation, until the Duke of Aquitaine was effectively lord of only a 
small part of that inheritance which was legitimately his. But for that, 
other differences might have been adjusted. 

But war being inevitable and not unwelcome, Edward for diplomatic 
purposes asserted a claim to the French Crown which in the then existing 
uncertainties of the law of succession was by no means without plausi- 
bility, at leasi in the year 1328, when it was first put forward. Had it not 
been asserted at that time, it would have been vitiated later by the birth 
in 1332 of Charles of Navarre, called the Bad; for Charles was the son of 
a daughter of Louis X., the immediate successor of Philip the Fair, and the 
child's claim was therefore stronger than that of Edward as the son of a 
sister of Louis. But his birth did not vitiate Edward's claim to have been 
dejure king four years before that event. It is therefore only fair to recognise 
that Edward's title was one which could be maintained by a perfectly con- 
scientious lawyer, although the weight of legal opinion would undoubtedly 
have supported the title of Philip VI. 

Political issues, however, not the dynastic issues, provided the real 
motive of the contest ; and among these were very important commercial 
issues. The commerce between England and Gascony was of great value 
to both countries, and was hampered by the relations between the King of 
France and the Duke of Aquitaine. The commerce between England and 
Flanders was still more important, and was endangered by the complicated 
relations between the cities of Flanders, the Count of Flanders, and the 
French king, which made the Flemish cities desirous of having the King of 
England for their supreme overlord rather than Philip of Valois. It was 
this more than anything else which caused Edward to give prominence to 
his claim to the French Crown among the reasons for the war. 

The opening campaigns were futile. Philip and Edward challenged 
each other to meet in the open field, but carefully evaded any actual collision 
in force. The armies ranged along the north-eastern marches of France, 
and desolated the country without accomplishing anything. But in 1 340 
Edward made formal alliance with the cities of Flanders, and explicitly took 
upon himself the title of King of France. In the course of the year was 
fought the great naval engagement of Sluys which decisively gave to the 
English the mastery of the Channel, hitherto disputed by the sailors of 
Normandy. At that time Sluys had a large open harbour, where a great 
fleet, chiefly Norman, was gathered. Here they were engaged by a great 
English fleet, the ships grappling each other ; and the fierce hand-to-hand 
fighting resulted in the complete victory of the English. The king took part 
in the engagement, which at once established his reputation as a warrior. 



156 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

But the land campaign was as futile as the last, and a truce was signed which 
remained in force till 1345. Edward, who had lavished large subsidies on 
his German allies, who made little enough practical return for them, was 
already in serious financial difficulties, and had incurred heavy debts to the 
Flemish cities ; and it was only by the ignominious expedient of secret flight 
that he was able, after signing the truce, to escape to England, leaving his 
debts unpaid. Attributing his embarrassments to the neglect of the officials 
whom he had left in charge of affairs in England, he attacked Archbishop 
Stratford, who, however, was able successfully to assert his title to be tried 




A sea fight about the time of the battle of Sluys. 
[From a MS. in the British Museum.] 

by his peers, and to procure a statute rendering the king's ministers re- 
sponsible to parliament. 

We may, however, set aside constitutional questions at present and pro- 
ceed with the story of the war, which was in effect continued in spite of 
the truce. Theoretically France and England were at peace ; but a question 
of succession arose in Brittany between John de Montfort and Charles of 
Blois. The two kings supported the rival claimants ; each of them as 
regards Brittany reversing the doctrines of succession by which he himself 
claimed the throne of France. From the English point of view this phase 
of the contest is chiefly notable on account of the battle of Morlaix, where 
the Earl of Northampton, in command of the English, won a victory over 
superior forces, by employing the archery tactics of Halidon Hill and 
Dupplin Moor for the first time on Continental soil. However, under these 
conditions the pretence of truce could not long be maintained. In 1345 
it came to an end. 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 



l $7 




English and French at Crecy. 



The king, now in dire need of money, cheerfully repudiated his enormous 
debts to the financial houses of Florence ; thereby very nearly ruining that 
city and cutting himself off from the sources from which he had hitherto 
managed to borrow. 
A new campaign was 
opened, this time in 
Gascony ; but the 
great interest centres 
in the northern cam- 
paign of 1346. In 
that year Edward in- 
vaded Normandy, 
and within two 
monthshad advanced 
almost to the walls of 
Paris. But Philip 
had collected a very 
much larger army, 
and Edward resolved 
to fall back to 
Flanders, with the French in pursuit. Having with great difficulty effected 
the passage of the Somme, he took up his position, on August 26th, on 
the famous field of Crecy, where he turned to bay. 

Crecy typifi€S the English tactics which found their origin in the Welsh 
and Scottish wars of Edward I. and were now 
perfected by Edward III. The approaching 
French outnumbered by four to one the English, 
who would have been doomed to destruction in a 
contest on the normal medieval principles, which 
decided battles by the weight of charging masses 
of heavily armoured horsemen. But the Flemings 
and Scots had both proved that massed bodies 
of spearmen could stand their ground against any 
cavalry charge, though their resistance could be 
shattered, as at Falkirk and Halidon Hill, by 
bringing archery into play. Edward III. was now 
to prove that the combination of infantry with 
archery could not only beat off but could an- 
nihilate an attack which relied wholly on cavalry. 
Like Bruce at Bannockburn, Edward drew up 
his forces with a narrow front, flanked by. ground not available for cavalry. 
The front was ranged in two divisions, a third being held in reserve ; 
while archers were thrown forward on either flank of each division, where, 
if attacked, they could fall back to cover. The regular foot soldiers 
were strengthened by dismounted horsemen, again as at Bannockburn, 




An archer of 14th century. 




158 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

while only a few mounted men were held in reserve. The French, 
though they arrived late in the day, resolved on an immediate attack. 
They advanced troops of Genoese cross-bow men, but the cross-bow was 
helpless against the long-bow^ JT,he Genoese were shot down before they 
had the English within range. The chivalry of France clamoured for the 
charge, and crashed forward, riding down the hapless Genoese. A storm 
of arrows poured upon the flanks of the charging columns, driving them 
instinctively to huddle together, and rolling over horse and man, so that 

they were already in 
helpless confusion 
long before they 
reached the masses of 
heavy infantry. Again 
and again they 
charged with desper- 

Cross-bow and quarrell as used at Cr&y. ate valour > but onl Y 

for a brief moment 
did any of them succeed in breaking into the English lines. Light-armed 
Welshmen dashed out to slaughter and strip the fallen ; the rout was as 
complete as that of Bannockburn ; vast numbers were slain ; the flower of 
the French nobility were either taken prisoners or left dead on the field. 

Complete though the victory was, Edward could make no use of it 
except to continue his march to the coast unmolested. There, however, 
he settled down to besiege Calais ; a port from which English shipping 
had suffered much injury, while its capture would provide a permanent 
gateway for entering France. For almost a year Calais held out stubbornly, 
but was finally starved into a surrender more famous for its medieval 
picturesqueness than even for its political importance ; a story too familiar 
to be repeated here. 

In the interval another success attended the English arms. As the 
ally of France, David of Scotland, who had recovered his throne in 1341, 
seized the opportunity in the autumn of 1346 to invade the north of Eng- 
land while Edward was in France. The invasion failed to relieve David's 
ally by drawing back troops, as was intended, for the defence of the north ; 
which very successfully took care of itself. At the battle of Neville's Cross 
the Scots were routed and David was taken prisoner. 

But in spite of brilliant victories the financial strain of the war was too 
great for Edward's resources, and in England taxation had reached the 
limit of popular endurance, although the general prosperity had been 
increasing so rapidly that the nation could have borne much heavier 
burdens without serious suffering. Moreover, Edward's allies were doing 
him no service ; so, having secured Calais and transformed it into an 
English town, the English king agreed to a truce in September 1347. The 
truce continued for eight years, although miscellaneous fighting was going 
on all the time. In 1354 the Pope nearly succeeded in negotiating a 




EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 159 

definitive peace, which would undoubtedly have been welcomed by the peoples 
of both France and of England. Edward was prepared to resign his claim 
to the French Crown if the quarrel over Aquitaine were settled by the 
grant of full sovereignty in Guienne and the disputed provinces. But the 
French king refused to give way, and the English Estates supported Edward 
in reviving the war in 1355. 

Military operations were renewed on an extensive scale. The king's 
son, Edward the u Black Prince," who had won his spurs at Crecy, was 
despatched to Aquitaine, while the king himself in- 
tended to operate from Calais. The second move- 
ment, however, was paralysed, since the Scots effected 
a successful diversion by capturing Berwick and 
drawing Edward back to England in haste. But that 
winter the Black Prince devastated French territory 
in the south, while the king himself carried fire and 
sword over the south of Scotland in the raid known as 
the Burnt Candlemas. Also he resumed his grand- 
father's title as not only overlord but actual King 
of Scotland in place of Edward Balliol, who formally 
resigned his own futile pretensions in his favour. 
Then in Normandy and Brittany the tide of war surged Archer and arbalestier, 14th 

J J ° century. 

to and fro, mainly in favour of the English. But the 

grand event of the year 1356 was the Black Prince's incursion from 
Bordeaux into the regions of the Loire, which culminated in the brilliant 
victory of Poictiers. On this occasion, as in many other of the French 
battles, the force commanded by the prince was immensely outnumbered by 
the French ; while it was largely Gascon, not English, and was accompanied 
by only a few archers. The details of the battle are unusually obscure. 
Almost for the first time both sides fought on foot, but the English had the 
advantage of the slope. The decisive blow, however, was struck when 
Edward executed an unsuspected turning movement with the reserve force 
of mounted men, who instead of having fled as was generally supposed, 
appeared suddenly on the French rear, fell upon them, and turned what 
was already almost an assured repulse into a total route. Both the French 
King John and his youngest son Philip, afterwards Duke of Burgundy, were 
taken prisoners. 

With the two kings of France and Scotland in his hands Edward was 
now in a strong position for dictating terms. France fell into a condition 
of anarchy. English soldiers fought for their own hand as captains of 
"free companies." The peasantry broke out in the desperate revolt known 
as the Jacquerie. Edward released David of Scotland for a ransom which 
the Scots king was never actually able to pay in full ; but the terms of peace 
for France included not only a huge ransom to the king, but practically the 
cession in full sovereignty of all that had ever been held in France by an 
Angevin King of England. In spite of her miseries France would not yield. 



160 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

In the winter and spring of 1359-60 the war was renewed with increased 
fury ; but in May the hostilities were stopped by the temporary treaty of 
Bretigny. Edward renounced his claim to the French throne, and John his 
claim to the allegiance of the disputed districts of Aquitaine. All Aquitaine, 
and in addition the substantial north-eastern district which came to be known 
as the Calais Pale, was ceded in full sovereignty to the English king ; but in 
the final treaty of Calais the first-mentioned clauses of the treaty of Bretigny 
were not actually embodied. Peace, it seemed, had come at last. 



Ill 
THE ERA OF FAILURES 

Edward III. stood now at the height of his renown. In popular estima- 
tion he was by far the greatest captain of his day ; having, indeed, no rival 
except his own son, the Black Prince, who was still little more than thirty 
years of age. Of neither does the military reputation stand so high with 
posterity as it did in their own day. Neither was in any sense a master of 
strategy ; both planned even the campaigns in which they achieved their 
greatest triumphs as if the one object of generalship was successful raid- 
ing. But both were masters of the art of handling troops on the field of 
battle ; both knew how to inspire their men with complete confidence in 
their leader and in themselves. Under them the English fought to win, 
whatever the odds might be. And Edward III. has the credit for having 
perfected that form of battle array which did in practice repeatedly give the 
English victory in the face of immense odds. It is not without interest to 
observe that the principle of breaking up cavalry charges by a flank fire, 
which won the day at Crecy, reappeared with decisive effect nearly five 
hundred years later at the battle of Waterloo. 

But neither the conqueror's day of glory nor the triumphant peace 
which he seemed to have achieved were to be of long duration. France, 
indeed, had never formed a united nation, and Gascony felt no sense of 
alienation in being parted from the French Crown. But there were other 
portions of the dukedom of Aquitaine which resented the overlordship of 
the English king; also there were French districts of which sundry 
captains of free companies had made themselves masters, and these were by 
no means minded to surrender what they had won with their own swords 
merely because the Kings of England and France had made a treaty. 
Therefore the process of establishing the supremacy of King Edward and 
King John in the regions assigned to them respectively by the treaty was by 
no means a simple one, and was attended by a large amount of free fight- 
ing. Moreover, while the renunciatory clauses of the treaty of Bretigny 
had been omitted from the definitive treaty of Calais, it was with the under- 
standing that they were to be given effect later ; which completion of the 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 



1 6 1 



treaty was evaded by both parties. Hence large opportunities were 
presented, which might be seized by one party or the other, for denouncing 
it altogether. 

The King of France, John the Good, a mirror of knightly faith and 
honour, made every effort to fulfil his own obligations, even to the extent of 
voluntarily returning to his captivity in 
England when the payment of his ransom 
fell into arrear. The Edwards were equally 
punctilious in performing all that the laws 
of chivalry had demanded ; their courtesy 
and generosity were proverbial ; but neither 
Edward nor John's successor, Charles V., 
had any qualms about evading a promise 
if they could find a plausible excuse for 
doing so. Hence those renunciatory clauses 
were never formally ratified. Charles, a 
very much shrewder man than his father, 
set about the pacification of his realm with 
considerable success. 

Troubles in Spain to a great extent 
relieved France of the free companies, who 
with a light heart joined the stout French 
warrior Bertrand du Guesclin in supporting 
the revolt of Henry of Trastamare against 
Pedro the Cruel, King of Castile. But 
Pedro fled to the Black Prince, whose 
father had now instituted him the indepen- 
dent lord of Aquitaine. The prince's curi- 
ously distorted views of his chivalric devoir 
led him to take up the cause of the exiled 
tyrant. He crossed the Pyrenees with a 
large army, won the great victory of 
Navarette, and reinstated Pedro the Cruel. 
But he ruined his own health and that of 
his entire force, besides exhausting the 
finances of Aquitaine on the enterprise and 
incurring immense debts. Pedro, having won his crown, repudiated his 
obligations to his ally ; who returned to Bordeaux, and unwillingly enough 
taxed his subjects that he might pay his debts. The towns and the com- 
monalty of Aquitaine had found in the prince a ruler who treated them fairly 
enough, and were now ready to submit to his exactions ; but the barons, who 
had found their privileges curtailed, and preferred for their suzerain a very 
much hampered King of France to a vigorous duke in Bordeaux, took the 
opportunity to appeal against the taxes to Charles as their suzerain. 
Charles admitted the right of appeal, on the ground that King Edward had 

L 




A temporary besieging fort of timber. 
[From Froissart : s " Chronicles of England."] 



1 62 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

never formally renounced his claim to the French Crown : and cited the 
Black Prince to his court. The result was defiance from the Black Prince 
and the formal resuscitation of his father's claim to the French Crown. 

So once more France and England were at war, but under very much 
altered conditions. For the once mighty Edward III., though still far short 




France and the Angevin Dominion. 

.0 — — Boundary of France. 

— — — Boundary of the dominion of Henry II. 

English Boundary at Bretigny. 



of sixty, was already falling into a premature old age, and the Black 
Prince's powers were wrecked by disease. The English king had obtained 
little enough practical help from his allies in the past ; but now the German 
Empire had passed to the house of Luxemburg,, and the marriages of the 
last generation had so changed the interests of counts and princes that the 
French king now had allies where before he had enemies. 

The renewal of war, then, in 1369 was attended by a series of successes 
for the French arms, while all that the Black Prince could effect was 
the capture of Limoges, the sack and destruction of the city, and the 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 163 

massacre of its inhabitants. This was in 1370; and it did much more to 
alienate the population of Aquitaine than to terrorise them into submission 
to the duke. A year later the Black Prince himself was in England, having 
neither the health to lead his soldiers nor money to pay them. Again, a 
year later, a British fleet met with an overwhelming defeat off La Rochelle, 
thereby losing the command of the sea which had been held for more than 
thirty years. The war had no redeeming features ; and the defeat at La 
Rochelle effectively cut Aquitaine off from England. Edward's second sur- 
viving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- 
caster, led an expedition through France ; 
but the French avoided pitched battles 
after the manner of the Scots, wasted the 
country before the invaders, worried them 
on flank and rear, and raided their com- 
munications. Without having fought a 
single serious engagement, it was but a 
wreck of John of Gaunt's army which 
finally struggled into Bordeaux. The re- 
cord of exhaustion and futility was only 
brought to a close by a truce which covered 
the two last years of the old king's life ; 
when England was in practical possession 
of little more than Calais and Guisnes, the 
" Calais Pale,'\ in the north-east corner of 
France, and Bordeaux on the south-west. 

Disaster abroad was accompanied by 
faction and discord at home. Parlia- 
ment readily endorsed Edward's resolve to renew the war, but disgust 
took the place of enthusiasm as disaster followed disaster. At the demand 
of parliament the king dismissed in 1371 the clerical ministers whose mis- 
management was popularly held to be responsible ; but the new anti-clerical 
ministry brought no improvement. Pembroke, who had led the opposition, 
was defeated and captured at La Rochelle, and John of Gaunt, who had 
identified himself with the same party, got nothing but discredit out of his 
expedition in the following year. Anti-clericalism became the party cry of 
John of Gaunt's factibn ; while the party now in opposition was headed 
nominally by the dying Black Prince and more actively by Edmund Mortimer, 
Earl of March. Mortimer had married the daughter of Edward's second 
son, Lionel of Clarence, recently dead ; so that his infant son Roger stood 
next in succession to the Black Prince's own son Richard. The Anti-clericals 
called in to their aid the learned doctor John Wiclif ; who held austere 
views as to the iniquity of wealth and worldliness among the clergy, and was 
further promulgating unaccustomed doctrines, which were presently to be 
denounced by the Church as heretical and by politicians as anarchical. 

The parliament, summoned after a somewhat unusual interval of three 




English man-at-arms and archer. 
[From Froissart.] 



164 



NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 




years in 1376, gave the temporary victory to the Black Prince's party, who 
had honestly enough adopted the role of constitutionalists. A vigorous 
attack was made on the Anti-clerical or Court party. The trial and im- 
prisonment of Lord Latimer and other ministers are regarded as the first 
example of impeachment — the process under which officers of state are 
arraigned before the House of Lords by the House of Commons. At 
this juncture the Black Prince himself died. John of Gaunt made the 
mistake of inviting the Commons to make a declaration in favour of the 

French rule of succession, which would have 
given to himself and his son priority over young 
Roger Mortimer, who, as we have seen, claimed 
through his mother to stand next after Richard 
in the succession. Lancaster's proposal was 
emphatically rejected, but he had given colour 
to the belief that he was really playing for the 
Crown. Although his own position had been 
strengthened by the death of his elder brother, 
he could not resist the demand of the Commons 
that the control of the government should be 
placed in the hands of a nominated council. 
Nevertheless, he succeeded in packing a new 
parliament, which met at the beginning of the 
next year, with partisans of his own ; the pro- 
ceedings of the last or "Good" Parliament were' reversed, and Lancaster 
forcibly protected Wiclif against the attacks of the clerical party, though 
these were supported by the citizens of London. Conciliatory counsels, 
however, averted the outbreak of a civil war at the moment when the 
old king was dying neglected and almost forgotten. Whatever Lancaster's 
ambitions were, actual disloyalty was not among his sins, and the Black 
Prince's son Richard, young as he was, succeeded to the throne without 
opposition in June 1377. 

The accession of the young king, a boy of eleven, was accompanied 
by a general reconciliation, which found its expression in the personnel of 
the Council of Twelve who were placed in control of the government. 
Both parties were represented. Though neither Lancaster himself nor 
his younger brothers, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, were 
members of the Council, Lancaster's vast estates left him individually the 
most powerful man in the kingdom. A government thus constituted was 
hardly fitted to deal effectively with a crisis. The truce with France had 
come to an end, and matters went ill both in Aquitaine and on the seas. 
A new parliament was summoned in January which reverted definitely to the 
attitude of the Good Parliament, turned some of the Lancastrians out of 
the Council, and claimed definitely that no Act passed in parliament should 
be repealed without consent of parliament. The House then proceeded 
to vote supplies expressly for the war, and required the appointment of 



A 14th century abbot preaching. 







ENGLISH LIFE IN THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY 

Drawings from the beautiful Luttrell Psalter (made before 1346)- Those in the upper half illustrate the domestic 
preparations for a great feast in Sir Geoffrey Luttrell's house ; in the lower half are husbandry scenes. 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 105 

special auditors, who should see to it that the money was expended on 
the war and on nothing else — the first definite instance of the principle of 
11 appropriation of supply." 

Still the spirit of conciliation was abroad, and Lancaster, in spite of his 
political defeat, was entrusted with the control of naval and military 
operations, which as usual he mismanaged. The treasury was exhausted ; 
and to raise more money the Commons agreed to a poll-tax, graduated 
according to wealth, and ranging from a groat up to six pounds. The tax 
brought in less than half of what had been expected, and the fleet on 
which it was expended was shattered by a gale. There was another re- 
construction of the ministry, but no improvement in efficiency. Once 
more additional taxation was demanded, and again the reluctant Commons 
assented to a poll-tax, which this time was not graduated, but was assessed 
at a shilling a head on the whole adult population. Although an attempt 
was made to introduce a sort of local graduation, so that in each district 
the wealthier men should pay more than the poor, the practical effect was 
only to make the tax more severely felt in the poorer districts, since the 
average of a shilling a head over the district had to be maintained. This 
second poll-tax was the occasion, though not the cause, of the conflagration 
of 138 1, known as the Peasants' Revolt or Wat Tyler's Rebellion. 



IV 

CROWN, COMMERCE, AND PARLIAMENT 

Edward I. established the parliament of the three Estates in the closing 
years of his reign ; but that parliament had not learnt to assert itself gener- 
ally, and offered no resistance when the earls and the greater barons took 
upon themselves the office of controlling the king's government. The Good 
Parliament at the close of Edward III.'s reign shows the Commons taking 
a much more active part in affairs of state. Petitions and protests were freely 
put forward by the knights of the shire ; and the overseers appointed at the 
beginning of the reign of Richard II. to control the accounts were neither 
ministers of the king nor members of the baronage, but two leading citizens 
of London. 

The change that had taken place meant that the Commons had been step 
by step throughout the reign of Edward III. acquiring the effective power 
of the purse ; because the enormous expenditure, involved primarily by the 
wars, made the Crown more and more dependent upon supplies voluntarily 
granted by the Commons ; and at the same time the Commons grew more 
and more jealous of methods of raising revenue which were not dependent 
upon their goodwill. They had not at first made their control effective. They 
were strong enough to refuse money unless the king would make satisfactory 
promises ; but they were still without effective means of compelling the 



L 



i66 



NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 



king to carry out his promises when he had made them. For parliamentary 
supremacy, the first necessary stage was for parliament to have the power 
of withholding the supplies necessary to the carrying out of the king's policy ; 
the second step was the application of that power to 
the control of legislation ; and the third, still very 
remote, was its further application to the control of 
the Executive. 

Accordingly the reign shows the Crown becoming 
more and more dependent for funds on the goodwill 
of parliament ; while the doctrine is gaining ground 
that legislation, to be permanent, requires parliamentary 
sanction ; though parliament is only beginning to 
assume the initiative by expressing in petitions the 
principles which it wishes to see enacted. Its attempts 
to influence the administration are still more embryonic. 
Only under extreme circumstances and at the very end 
of the reign does parliament, as distinct from a 
baronial faction, take upon itself to attack the king's 
ministers or to demand powers of supervision. 

Edward was perfectly conscious that the policy 
on which he was embarking when he entered upon 
the French war involved his own dependence upon 
parliament, and he took care that parliament should 
expressly commit itself to endorsing his policy ; although 
by so doing he encouraged the development of the idea, 
which as yet existed only in germ, that parliament was 
entitled to a voice in the direction of policy. At the 
same time it was an object with him, as it had been 
with his grandfather, to minimise that dependence. 
He endeavoured, therefore, to develop independent 
sources of revenue. Something which may be called 
a commercial policy had first become operative in the 
time of his grandfather ; partly because Edward as 
a nationalist statesman had began to recognise in 
commercial expansion one of the roads to national 
welfare and national strength ; partly because he 
hoped to obtain from it an increase of the royal 
revenue which should not involve direct reference to 
the Estates. Like aims caused the third Edward to 
develop a commercial policy so energetic that he has been called the 
Father of English commerce. 

We have seen that until the reign of Edward III. foreign commerce was 
extremely limited. Every borough and every district aimed at being self- 
sufficing ; so also did the nation. The enterprising foreigner sought a 
market for his own goods in England and purchased raw materials from 



A merchant of 1367. 
[From a brass at Lynn.] 




EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 167 

England ; but the Englishman hardly attempted to seek a foreign market 
for his own goods or to procure from foreign countries goods which he 
could sell again at a profit at home. The wine and the cloths which he 
had not learnt to manufacture at home the foreigner would bring to his 
doors ; and if the foreigner chose to bring his goods for sale, he must spend 
the purchase-money in buying other goods from Englishmen. 

But the Englishman was now progressing beyond this passive attitude. 
He was beginning to produce with an eye to the foreign purchaser ; even 
to exporting on his own ^ ^ 
account, instead of merely < 
selling to the foreigner 
who came to buy. And 
because Englishmen were 
prospering they were also 
inclined to buy more of 
the goods which were only 
to be had from the for- 
eigner. It was realised 
that prosperity comes to 
those who seek a market. 
The Crown perceived that A S oIdsmith ' s sho P in the J 4 th centu T- 

if energy were devoted to facilitating the expansion of trade, it could take 
its own toll at the same time without discouraging enterprise ; and the 
more trade expanded the bigger the "Soil would be. Hence the value 
attaching to the commerce with Flanders and the commerce with his 
own Gascon dominions materially influenced Edward III. in his French 
policy. English wool growers and Gascon wine growers would flourish ; 
and the more they flourished the more the royal exchequer would extract 
as the price of the privileges of exporting wool and importing wine. It 
followed that the king sought to strain to the utmost the royal prerogative 
of imposing customs nominally for the regulation of trade, and of bargain- 
ing with the merchants for their assent to such impositions without referring 
to parliament. And when parliament realised what was going on, parlia- 
ment in turn insisted that its own assent was necessary to the imposition of 
customs. In spite of repeated efforts to evade the principle, Edward found 
himself obliged to give way. The Crown's right to the " Ancient Customs " 
in accordance with the statute of 1275 was unchallenged ; but it was estab- 
lished during the reign that other duties, even if they became habitual, re- 
quired the assent of parliament for their imposition ; and even if their 
renewal might be practically relied upon, it was on each occasion made only 
for a definite period. 

In the conditions of medieval society, both the expansion of trade and 
the collection of revenue were facilitated by the famous institution of the 
Merchants of the Staple. In modern times, laissez /aire doctrine condemns 
the regulation of commerce by the State on the ground that private enter- 



1 68 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

prise is hampered thereby. When the State gives the individual protection 
against violence and fraud it has discharged its proper function. But in the 




The towns underlined are " Towns of the Staple " 



middle ages the great danger to private enterprise was insecurity against 
violence and fraud. For security, State or municipal supervision was a 
necessity The export trade in English staple products, wool, wool-fells, 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 169 

hides, leather and some others, was made a monopoly of the merchants of 
the staple. Membership was open on the payment of fees, and was condi- 
tional only on the observance of the company's regulations ; while the 
members traded severally on their own account — not after the fashion of a 
modern Joint Stock Company, in which the society does the trading and 
distributes the profits. The trading was confined to specified towns con- 
nected with specified ports in England ; and also to specified towns on the 
Continent, though ultimately the monopoly was given to Calais. It was thus 
possible to compel all traders to conform to definite regulations, and to pro- 
vide security for the purchaser in respect of the bulk and quality of the 
goods purchased. At the same time the collection of the customs was very 
much simplified. 

But Edward was not satisfied with the encouragement of exports. He 
also encouraged imports by offering privileges to traders from Gascony 
and the Low Countries ; to the Gascons, with an eye to the wealth of 
Gascony rather than of England ; to the Flemings, with an eye to reciprocal 
privileges ; to both with an eye to the revenue derivable from customs. 
Edward is not to be credited with any anticipation of Free Trade doctrines 
as to the economic advantage of buying in the cheapest market ; he probably 
looked very little beyond the opportunity presented of taking a toll for 
himself from the traders. The doctrine was fully accepted that money, 
a scarce and valuable commodity, should not be carried out of the kingdom 
in exchange for the goods brought in. The foreigner in England could 
only trade as x member of an association under strict regulation and super- 
vision, at particular times and particular places ; and he was obliged to buy 
goods to the value of those he sold. But he was encouraged to sell as 
well as to buy ; and the volume of trade and the amount of material wealth 
in the country increased rapidly. 

In one particular Edward appears to have been moved by more definite 
economic considerations. He encouraged foreigners to settle in England 
and carry on industries which had not taken a natural root in the country. 
From the foreigners in their midst the English learnt industrial arts which 
they had hitherto ignored ; and during the fourteenth century the English 
became not merely wool-growers but manufacturers of the cloth which had 
hitherto been imported from the Low Countries. So much advance was 
made in this industry that regulations were made to limit or even prohibit 
the export of wool in order to keep down the price for the benefit of 
English cloth-makers. Before the end of the century English cloths were 
in full competition with those of Flanders. 

The customs then provided a source of revenue which in previous 
centuries had hardly been taken into account ; but it was one which the 
king could only to a very limited extent claim as falling within his control. 
Except as concerned the " Ancient Customs," it was a source of supply which 
it was technically within the power of parliament to cut off, although in 
practice an authority to levy particular customs, frequently renewed, was 





Gold rose-noble of Edward III. 



170 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

likely to become permanent as a matter of course if not as a matter of 
technical right. Thus the impost called tonnage and poundage, a fixed 
tax upon every ton of wine and every pound of merchandise imported, was 
first sanctioned towards the close of Edward's reign, renewed for periods of 
two or three years, and gradually became a practically assured source of 
income ; until in the reign of Henry VI. it was granted to the king for 
life, and continued to be so granted at the beginning of each reign until 
the accession of Charles I. Similarly, Edward I. had laid tallages upon the 

towns, and bargained with 
the merchants for subsidies 

Ws?^\^M*WM\ /^ ifliSll^^l^S on w0 °l- B°th practices had 

^^H^^^^^^M\ J^m^^%^^^^^\ been challenged, but neither 

had been definitely pro- 
hibited ; and Edward III. 
made use of both. But both 
were finally prohibited in his 
reign by statute, the tallages 
in 1340 and the wool sub- 
sidies in 1362. 
Practically the permanent expenditure so far exceeded what the king 
could meet out of revenue under his own control that he was in constant 
need of specific grants from parliament ; especially after the ruin of the 
Florentine bankers, by Edward's repudiation of his debt, made it impossible 
for him to borrow on a large scale. The form followed was for the king 
to invite the Estates to grant him what was needful ; they responded each 
according to its own willingness and capacity, the barons, the clergy, the 
shires and the cities taxing themselves severally. Thus it became the 
custom with the Commons to make a tenth and a fifteenth the standard 
subsidy ; which on occasion might be raised to two-tenths and two-fifteenths. 
But the right was reserved of presenting petitions for legislation as a con- 
dition preliminary to the grant being made. It did not, however, follow 
that the statute actually promulgated was a precise fulfilment of the petition 
presented. That principle was not formally laid down until the reign 
of Henry V. 

In 1 3 41, at the time of the quarrel with Stratford, the king to obtain 
funds accepted the demands of parliament ; yet a few months later he 
repudiated his promise and cancelled his concessions. But when parlia- 
ment again met, its formal assent to that cancellation was obtained, and the 
king did not repeat the experiment. When, five and thirty years later, John 
of Gaunt on his own authority cancelled the Acts of the Good Parliament 
after its dissolution, although the parliament immediately following endorsed 
his action, it was subsequently enacted formally that Acts of parliament 
could only be repealed by Act of parliament. 

Of the legislation of the reign an important portion consists in the 
various declaratory Acts defining and limiting the rights of the Crown as to 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 



171 



raising revenue ; much as we saw that precise definition was the object of 
a great deal of the legislation of Edward I. In the same way the direct 
outcome of the quarrel with Stratford was the final definiteness of the 
assertion of the principle of trial by peers. To the same category of defin- 
ing Acts belongs the important Statute of Treasons, which for the first time 
set forth precisely that the crime of trerron consisted in the compassing of 
the death of the king, the queen, or the heir apparent, and in levying war 
against the king or assisting his 
enemies. With these were included 
the slaying of the king's ministers 
or judges, and counterfeiting the 
king's coinage or the Great Seal. 
In another field, legislation pointed 
to the increase of anti-clerical feeling 
marked by the Statutes of Provisors 
and of Praemunire ; the first directed 
against the usurpation by the Pope 
of the right to make ecclesiastical 
appointments, and the second,against 
the ecclesiastical custom of carrying 
appeals to Rome. In both cases 
the principles asserted were those 
which no kings of England had sur- 
rendered until the submission of 
King John to Innocent III. Even 
Edward I., however, had only suc- 
ceeded in resisting papal claims 
which were new in . his own day ; 
he had not recovered the ground 
which his father and grandfather 
lost. But throughout the fourteenth 
century papal authority and eccle- 
siastical influence were losing weight ; because for three-fourths of the 
century the headquarters of the papacy were at Avignon instead of at 
Rome, and the Popes,, instead of standing forth as the theocratic heads of 
Christendom, were politically to a great extent subservient to the French 
Crown. Moreover, when at last the captivity at Avignon came to an end, it 
was followed by the Great Schism, when there were constantly two rival 
popes, one of whom was supported by one-half of Western Christendom 
and the other by the other half. The awe and reverence inspired for two 
hundred years by the successors of Hildebrand faded ; the ground was 
being prepared for the great revolt against the papacy which culminated in 
the Reformation, of which Wiclif was already sowing the seed before 
Edward III. was in his grave. 

One more feature of the reign remains to be noted in connection with 




A bishop's court. 
[From a 14th century MS.] 



172 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

the relations of the Crown with the baronage. Edward III. carried to a 
much higher pitch his grandfather's plan of creating a dominant baronage of 
the blood royal by the absorption of earldoms and great estates in the hands 
of members of the royal family. The great territorial possessions of the 
house of Lancaster, itself sprung from the brother of Edward I., passed to 
the king's third son, John of Gaunt, who became Duke of Lancaster, by his 
marriage with Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster. At the time of Edward's 
death there was no one else bearing the title of Duke. Another group of 
earldoms went to the king's second son, Lionel of Clarence, and passed on 
his death to the house of Mortimer through his daughter, the wife of the 
Earl of March. Two other sons survived, of whom one, Edmund, was 
later made Duke of York, and the other, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. At 
the close of Edward's reign the hereditary peers summoned to the Lords' 
chamber were little more than half as many as those summoned to the 
Model Parliament ; and the process continued during the following reigns. 
The old principle of preventing the accumulation of great estates was 
abandoned for that of accumulating them in the hands of the royal kin ; 
with results which presently proved disastrous. 




A state-carriage of about 1330. 
[From the Luttrell Psalter.] 



V 



THE BLACK DEATH AND THE PEASANT REVOLT 



We turn now to the social conditions and the events which led up 
to the great Peasants' Revolt of 13 8 1, the story of the revolt itself, and 
the examination of its importance in the social and economic progress of 
the country. 

We saw that at the time of the Norman Conquest the soil was divided 
into the demesne lands or private estates of lords of the manor and the 
holdings of ceorls politically free, though the great bulk of them held their 
plots — "yards" or "virgates " of thirty acres, half virgates of fifteen acres, 
or still smaller holdings — by payment of agricultural service, or rent, or 
both, to the lord of the manor. We saw further that by the reign of 
Henry II. the bulk of these occupiers holding by service had become serfs 
bound to the soil, this whole class bearing the general name of villeins ; 
among whom were not generally included those who paid rent but not 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD „ 

service, nor all of those who paid service With ». c 73 




Penshurst, the hall of a i 4 th century Baron. 
[Built about 1340.] 



and it followed that the ni„ f 

for which wages were paid. ^t^r™ ^ "P' 30 ^ ^ lab °" 
agncultural labourers, consisting of land.1T " P " "*"" °'' ^Se-^ming 
were still technically bonnd to the sod tho ^ *"* SmM cottars > w "° 
liberty of mi g ra . tion was ^* e ""ij* <Wgh ra practice some degree of 

H nutted. The process continued steadily and 



i 7 4 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

almost unconsciously for nearly two centuries ; so that in the early years 
of Edward III. the superior villeins were materially little if at all worse off 
than the yeomanry, that is free-holders or holders by free tenure, although 
they were socially inferior ; while the inferior villeins made their subsistence 
mainly as wage-earning labourers, enjoying while in full employment wages 
sufficient to feed and house and clothe them very much better than their 
contemporaries in France and elsewhere — though they probably found life 
hard enough in winter and in seasons of scarcity or pestilence. 

But in the years which followed the battle of Crecy, England, in common 
with Europe in general, was visited by the appalling pestilence known as 
the Black Death. It appeared in England in 1347 an< ^ x 34^» an( ^ recurred 
at intervals during the next twenty years. So terrible was the visitation 
that in the rural districts it may be estimated from the evidence that not 
less than one-third — perhaps a full half — of the population was swept 
away. The fields were left unfilled, and there was a terrible scarcity of 
food. The demand for labour greatly exceeded the supply, while the price 
of provisions rose. The labourer demanded higher wages. High wages 
and high cost of living reacted on each other ; the men would not work 
except at prices which from the landowners' point of view were extor- 
tionate. 

In 1350 the government intervened with an ordinance which was 
ratified by parliament as the Statute of Labourers. The knights of the shire, 
the most influential section of the House of Commons, were themselves 
landowners with whom the landowners' point of view inevitably prevailed, 
though they had no intention of acting unjustly or in the interests of a 
class. The Statute ordained that food should be sold at the prices ruling 
before the coming of the Black Death, and that the labourer should work 
for the same wages. For infractions of the law both parties were to be 
penalised, those who demanded and those who paid more than legal wages 
and prices. Further, the law which bound the villeins to the soil was to 
be enforced, and the labourer might on no account migrate from his 
manor to seek higher wages elsewhere. But if the landowners had the law 
behind them, the labourers were for the most part practically masters of the 
situation. The law was only partially successful in checking the high 
prices and the high wages. In the circumstances it was inevitable that 
many of the landowners should fall back upon any technical rights they 
possessed. In many cases the commutation of service for rent had been 
merely an act of grace ; that is to say, it had not been secured by any proper 
legal bond. Landlords and their agents strained the technical point of law 
to claim unpaid service from the villeins. 

It is quite superfluous to accuse either landlords or labourers of a 
monstrous reversion to an obsolete tyranny or of a monstrous attempt to 
take an immoral advantage of a national disaster. Both could easily con- 
vince themselves that reason and justice were all on their own side and not 
at all on the side of the other party. A bitter class hatred sprang into being, 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 175 

which may well have been fostered by appalling tales brought back from 
France of the Jacquerie, the horrible sufferings of the French peasantry, and 
the horrible doings which attended their revolt and their suppression. More- 
over, the peasantry learnt a new antagonism to the existing social order from 
the consciousness that the greatest of the English victories had been won 
by men not of knightly rank but practically of their own class, the yeomanry 
from whom the archers of England were drawn. 

It does not appear that the growing discontent and bitterness were due 
to any extreme destitution among the peasantry. William Langland, the 
writer of the great contemporary allegory, the Vision of Piers Plowman, paints 
an ugly enough picture of the doings of some of the lords of the manor 
and their agents ; but there is no reason to suppose that such oppression and 
chicanery were more than occasional. And, on the other hand, Langland 
does not spare the lash in describing the unthrift of the peasants, their self- 
indulgence, and their love of shirking legitimate toil. His indignation was 
begotten of the moral deficiencies which he saw in every class, and must be 
discounted, like the indignation of embittered moralists in all ages. But the 
mere fact that the accustomed conditions of labour and of food production 
were hopelessly disorganised by the great pestilence, and were kept in a 
state of disorganisation by its occasional recrudescence, necessarily prevented 
the country from recovering its former sense of easy prosperity ; while the 
moral atmosphere was made worse by the depression and disgust attending 
the later phases of the war with France. The soil thus prepared was 
eminently fitted for revolutionary doctrines to take root in. 

And revolutionary doctrines were in the air. Without any idea of stirring 
up the commonalty against the gentry, John Wiclif was playing a part not 
without its analogy to that of the French Encyclopaedists before the French 
Revolution, four centuries later. As a theologian he propounded the view 
that " Dominion is of Grace " ; whereof the practical interpretation is that 
power is given by God for the furtherance of His glory, and those who use 
their power for other ends have no right to it ; from which it again follows 
that power misused may lawfully be resisted and even forcibly taken away. 
As a Christian reformer of morals Wiclif preached self-denial and taught 
of human brotherhood. Such doctrines are easily translated into either 
Socialism or Anarchism. 

Nor may it be forgotten that the villeins as a class had a real though not 
a new grievance in the rankling sense that they were not free men ; that 
they were treated as servile and inferior to free men ; that the process by 
which they had been gradually passing into the ranks of free men and 
escaping degrading conditions of tenure had met with an ominous check ; 
that even those who were now technically free were in danger of falling back 
into a servile condition. Then to crown their grievances came the second 
poll-tax, which appeared as an intolerable and unjust burden upon the poor 
while it was comparatively unfelt by the rich. 

According to tradition an accidental spark fired the flame. A collector 



176 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

of the unpopular tax insulted the daughter of a peasant, Wat Tyler, who 
struck him down. Other peasants gathered to support their comrade, and 
on a sudden all Kent was up in arms, the counties north-east of London 
following suit. From Kent on the south, from Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, 
and Hertfordshire on the north, the gathering bands of insurgents marched 
on the capital. 

In many localities actual incidents of villeinage, legal rights of a lord — 
the " lord " being often a monastery — legal wrongs of villeins, were the motive 

of the outbreak ; there was much clamour- 
ing against the name of serf, and the most 
general demand was that for the right to 
occupy land at what the peasants regarded 
as a reasonable rent. The prominence of 
these facts has obscured another ; namely, 
that the rural population of Kent were 
not villeins at all but free men not hold- 
ing by servile tenure ; while the eastern 
counties with their large Danish element 
were notoriously those in which there was 
the largest proportion of free tenants. 
Although the insurrection spread sporadi- 
cally to other districts, those in which 
^H villeinage was most universal were the 
least conspicuously disturbed. Contem- 
porary annalists declare that the Kentish 
leader who also bore the narre of Wat 
Tyler was meditating a political and social programme of an exceedingly 
advanced type, aimed not at the destruction of the monarchy but at a 
very democratic control of the government ; in which there was no room 
for baronage, gentry, lawyers, and prelates. One of its most fervent 
prophets was the fanatical and entirely honest priest, John Ball, who 
to-day would undoubtedly have called himself a Christian Socialist. It 
is therefore a tenable proposition that the revolt was organised and 
engineered by real democratic revolutionaries, with whom the mere griev- 
ances of villeins as such were a secondary consideration, utilised as means 
to a more important end. 

The Londoners opened their gates to the Kentish insurgents ; more 
than half of those who were afterwards listed as ringleaders were Londoners ; 
facts which again suggest that the grievances of villeins as such were not 
at the root of the matter. 

Masses of the Essex insurgents were already encamped outside the 
city on the northern side. The young king and some of the Council were at 
the Tower ; but both they and the city authorities appear to have been 
paralysed, and although nearly a fortnight had elapsed since the first out- 
break, no defensive measure had been taken. Both the great bodies of 




John Ball haranguing. 
[From Froissart.] 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 177 

insurgents pillaged the houses of particularly obnoxious persons and killed 
a few obnoxious individuals ; but their leaders had other objects than 
immediate pillage, and on the whole kept their men in hand. When Tyler 
and his following entered London, they wrecked John of Gaunt's palace 
of the Savoy and the houses of others who were especially unpopular, 
besides breaking open and burning the Fleet Prison and Newgate ; but they 
refrained from looting. 

Richard from the Tower gave out that he would meet the insurgent 
leaders at a conference at Mile-end. He fulfilled his promise, and in effect 
conceded all the demands which the insurgent leaders formulated. Villein- 
age and feudal services were to be abolished, and there was to be a general 
amnesty, though the king would not pledge himself to punish those whom 
the insurgents stigmatised as traitors. But while the conference was going 
on there was an outbreak of violence on the part of those who had remained 
in the city, in the course of which Archbishop Sudbury and Hales the 
Treasurer were both murdered. It is noteworthy that much of the popular 
resentment was directed against the aliens, represented by the colony of 
Flemings. 

On the same day the king issued a number of the promised pardons, 
and many of the insurgents began to disperse. Many thousands, however, 
still remained with the leaders, who were by no means satisfied with the 
concessions already made. During the night and the next morning there 
were further scenes of violence, and the king announced that he would 
again meet the Readers at Smithfield. The boy of fourteen was no coward, 
and probably enjoyed the theatrical character if not the actual danger of 
the proceedings. With an escort of two hundred men in civil array he 
rode to Smithfield, where the masses of the insurgents were drawn up. Tyler 
rode out to meet him — insolently enough, it may be presumed. He had a 
new list of grievances which must be remedied. The accounts vary as to 
the details of what then occurred ; but it must be remembered that every 
one of them was written from a point of view vehemently hostile to Tyler. 
It is agreed, however, that Tyler, for whatever cause, laid hand on his dagger, 
and the movement was interpreted as a threat to the king's person. Wal- 
worth, the Mayor of London, who was riding by the king, drew upon Tyler 
and cut him down. The cry rang down the ranks of the peasants, " Treason ! 
they have slain our captain ! " Bows were bent ; it seemed certain that the 
whole of the king's company would be overwhelmed and slaughtered by 
the enraged insurgents. But the boy's courage and presence of mind saved 
the situation. Setting spurs to his horse, before any one could stop him 
he dashed forward alone across the open space towards the rebel ranks. 
" Will you shoot your king ? " he called. " I will be your captain and 
leader. Follow me." His horse paced slowly towards the open fields to 
the north. Bows were unbent. Astonished and fascinated, the great array 
followed, the king's retinue hurrying to join them. But the mayor slipped 
back to the city and called every loyal citizen to arms. The promptitude 

M 



178 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

with which the appeal was answered seems to prove that the orderly element 
had only been waiting for a leader to assert itself. So quickly was a 
powerful force collected that when it arrived on the scene the king was 
still holding the insurgents in parley. 

With the troop now at his back the king's person was safe ; the insur- 
gents recognised that the fighting odds were no longer in their favour. 
Richard proclaimed that they all had leave to depart and disperse to their 
homes ; and they took him at his word. The boy king, and he alone, had 

won a purely personal triumph, 
from which men werewarranted 
in auguring great things for the 
Black Prince's son. 

But the promises Richard 
had made he probably never 
intended to fulfil ; nor was it 
in his power to carry them 
out save by assent of the 
Estates. The insurgents had 
scarcely dispersed, the writing 
on the promised pardons and 
charters was scarcely dry, when 
the king repudiated his pro- 
mises in most unmistakable 
terms. Apart, however, from 
people killed in actual riots, 
or in conflicts between armed 
bands of insurgents and loyal- 
ists, or as a consequence of 
such conflicts, it does not seem 
that many more than a hundred 
persons were actually put to 
death. Parliament met in the 
winter, and emphatically en- 
dorsed Richard's repudiation of his promises. Those promises, they said, 
were invalid and illegal until confirmed by parliament, and parliament 
absolutely refused to confirm them. No concessions whatever were made 
in favour of the peasants. 

It has often been maintained that, although the revolt was crushed, the 
peasant rising actually brought victory to the peasants' cause. As a matter 
of historical fact this does not seem to have been the case. Down to the 
time of the Black Death a natural movement had been in progress, tending 
towards the gradual disappearance of serfdom through the substitution of 
rent and wages for forced services ; a process which under normal condi- 
tions was proving advantageous to lords and to villeins alike. The natural 
process was checked by a cataclysm ; the Black Death made the conditions 




Richard II. 
[From the contemporary painting belonging to the Earl of Pembroke.] 






EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 179 

abnormal ; and of those abnormal conditions the revolt was the last start- 
ling phase. It accomplished nothing whatever ; but after it was all over and 
there was no recurrence of the pestilence, the economic conditions reverted 
practically to what they had been before the Black Death ; and as they 
again became normal, the old causes again operated and the old natural 
process of liberation naturally revived. Prices fell ; the wage labourer was 
consequently content with a lower money wage ; and again the employer 
found that a money rent and voluntary paid labour paid him better than 
forced labour and tenure by service. Hence in the course of the next half 
century villeinage did practically disappear, forced service became a merely 
local survival, and the villein became a tenant paying a small fixed rent 
with security of tenure. The security of tenure had always been his, since 
the lord had no power to eject the villein from his holding so long as he 
rendered the recognised services ; and the recognised services were now 
commuted for a recognised rent, which left the tenant the same security. 

As a democratic movement the revolt led to nothing ; and the parlia- 
ments remained, as before, representative of the landed and commercial 
interests. 



VI 

THE REIGN OF RICHARD II 

In the Peasant Revolt the young Richard had displayed the qualities of 
courage, self-reliance, and readiness in emergency in a very high degree. But 
he was still only a half-grown boy, the direction of affairs was virtually in 
the hands of his Council, and the effective head of the government was 
his eldest uncle, the Duke of Lancaster, who, fortunately for himself, 
was absent in Scotland at the time of the revolt. But Lancaster's adminis- 
tration through these first years of the new reign continued to be inefficient ; 
he was extremely unpopular, and the high-spirited boy resented his control. 
By way, perhaps, of counterbalancing him, his brothers were now made 
Dukes of York and Gloucester, but the young king did not place himself in 
their hands, giving his confidence instead to a young favourite, the Earl of 
Oxford, and more wisely, to an experienced official, Michael de la Pole, who 
was made Earl of Suffolk — the first instance of a mercantile family being 
raised to the baronage. 

An invasion of Scotland of the usual type, in 1385, on which Lancaster 
was accompanied by the young king, did nothing to improve the duke's 
position ; and immediately after it he retired from England, in the hope of 
enforcing his own claim to the crown of Castile through his wife, a daughter 
of Pedro the Cruel, who had ultimately been ejected by Henry of Trasta- 
mare. But Lancaster's departure did not improve matters for the king, 
since it gave Gloucester an opening to place himself at the head of the 



180 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

opposition to De la Pole, whom the baronage regarded as an upstart. 
Moreover, the king made himself unpopular by the honours and the wealth 
which he lavished on his favourite, the Earl of Oxford, whom he made 
Duke of Ireland, whereas Gloucester made it his business to court that 
popularity which had never been sought by his brother of Lancaster. An 
alarm of a French invasion roused popular anger against the administration 
which had rendered such a thing possible ; and it was easy enough to make 
the king's favourite counsellors the objects of public indignation, though 
Suffolk was perhaps the last person who deserved it. The baronage, beaded 
by Gloucester and supported by the Commons, refused supplies unless the 
obnoxious "favourites" were removed from their offices; and ominous 
references were made to the deposition of Edward II. 

The king ostensibly surrendered, and according to precedent a Council 
was nominated to control the administration. But Richard's apparent 
surrender was merely a temporising expedient. In the following year he 
called an irregular assembly at Nottingham, attended by the judges, which 
pronounced that the proceedings of the late parliament were unconstitutional 
and invalid. Gloucester and his allies at once took up arms "to deliver 
the king from evil counsellors," according to the familiar formula. Five of 
them proceeded to "appeal" five of the said evil counsellors of treason, and 
hence became known as the Lords Appellant. The king and his friends 
could make no corresponding display of force. The Duke of Ireland suc- 
ceeded in making his escape from the country ; so in course of time did 
Suffolk. The king himself became practically a prisoner, and the Lords 
Appellant were complete masters of the situation. 

However, they continued their professions of loyalty to the king himself, 
and summoned what is sometimes called the Wonderful and sometimes the 
Merciless Parliament. The five "evil counsellors" who had been appealed 
were impeached ; so were the judges who at the Council of Nottingham had 
pronounced the proceedings of the previous parliament invalid. Other 
victims were added, although one at least of the Lords Appellant, Henry 
Earl of Derby, the son of the still absent Duke of Lancaster, endeavoured to 
check the vindictiveness of Gloucester. 

And yet, in spite of the completeness of his defeat, the king in the follow- 
ing year again effected a revolution. In 1388, the year of the Wonderful 
Parliament, he was not yet of full age. But in 1389 he reminded the 
Council that he was now twenty-one, and being no longer a minor was en- 
titled to follow his own counsel ; he would dispense with their further 
services. Strangely enough, they acquiesced in the dismissal. Probably the 
Appellants knew that the use they had made of their power had lost them 
the popular favour which had at first made them irresistible. At the same 
time the king was wise enough to avoid their blunder, and to abstain from 
retaliatory measures, which would have made Gloucester and the rest turn 
to bay. But he recalled his uncle of Lancaster, on whose loyalty at least 
he knew he could depend, whatever his faults might be. Lancaster had at 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 181 

last learnt the futility of his enterprise in Castile, and his presence would 
effectively muzzle the Duke of Gloucester. 

The French war had worn itself out, and the desultory raids and counter- 
raids on the Scottish border were brought to an end. Richard, after all, 
made no violent changes in the personnel of his ministers and his Council, 
and for some years the government was continued on orderly and constitu- 
tional lines. To these years belong the amendments to the Anti-clerical 
statutes of Provisors, Mortmain, and Praemunire which made them more 
stringent ; while the new form taken by the last statute ultimately made it 
a most effective instrument in the final contest with Rome. These measures 
were significant of the constant growth of the Anti-ecclesiastical sentiment 
and of the multiplication of the disciples of Wiclif, who were now known as 
Lollards. On the theological side this movement was beginning to develop 




Ladies hawking. 



the advocacy of novel doctrines, which were very shortly to be pronounced 
heretical ; but it is safe to say that most of what passed for Lollardry at 
this time had but little to do with theology, and was directed almost entirely 
against the clerical wealth and clerical worldliness which scandalised a laity 
by no means unprosperous or eager on its own part to renounce the world 
and the flesh. 

Unhappily, Richard's self-restraint and moderation were only assumed, 
cloaking a self-willed and vindictive spirit. He was biding his time, and in 
1397 ne thought that his time had come. Gloucester's conduct laid him 
open to suspicions of treasonable intrigues. Suddenly the king struck. 
Gloucester was arrested and sent off to Calais under the charge of Thomas 
Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, one of the Lords Appellant who, like Henry 
of Bolingbroke or Derby, had acted as a restraining influence on the other 
.three. At the same time with Gloucester, the other two Lords Appellant, 
Warwick and Arundel, were arrested. In effect no new charges were brought 
against any of the three; the real ground of the attack was their conduct 
at the time of the Merciless Parliament. Arundel was tried and executed ; 



1 82 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

his brother the Archbishop was impeached and sentenced to confiscation 
and banishment. Warwick confessed his old guilt and was banished. 
But Gloucester did not appear to answer the charges ; Mowbray announced 
that he had fallen ill and died at Calais. Public rumour of course affirmed 
that Mowbray had put him to death by the king's orders ; and the circum- 
stances were at least suspicious enough, though the truth of the report was 
never proved. Perhaps the strongest argument against the belief is to be 
found in the fact that, if it was impolitic to run the risk of openly putting 
Gloucester to death as a traitor after fair trial, it was still more impolitic to 
risk the suspicion of a secret assassination. 

Nottingham and Derby, whose conduct from the very beginning had 
distinguished them favourably among the Lords Appellant, were treated 
with conspicuous favour, and were made Dukes of Norfolk and Hereford 
respectively ; still, both of them must have suspected that danger lurked 
behind the king's show of friendliness. A parliament, however, was sum- 







Ladies shooting rabbits. 



moned in 1397 a * Shrewsbury, and Richard found that it represented a 
marked reaction of sentiment in his favour. The country may well have 
imagined that the elaborate machinery for the curtailment of the royal 
power had been warranted when the king was a boy but was superfluous 
now that he was a man experienced in affairs, who certainly possessed 
kingly qualities, and, since his coming of age, appeared to have learnt self- 
mastery and moderation. Even his recent proceedings could hardly be 
called vindictive. So the Shrewsbury Parliament showed itself ready to re- 
establish the royal power free from the trammels which had been imposed 
during Richard's reign. The proceedings of the Wonderful Parliament 
were formally condemned, while the pronouncements of the Nottingham 
Council were confirmed. It was even resolved by this assembly that no 
restraint set upon the king could be legal, and that any one hereafter 
attempting to reverse its own proceedings would be guilty of treason. 
Finally it took the fatal step of surrendering its own powers to a committee 
of eighteen, which would thenceforth be able to act in the place of parlia- 
ment ; the committee being virtually Richard's own nominees. 

But Richard was still unsatisfied ; the field was not yet clear so long as 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 183 

Norfolk and Hereford were in the country. The two dukes played into 
his hands. Norfolk confided to Hereford his own suspicion of Richard's 
sinister intentions ; Hereford communicated this confidence to the king, - 
who invited him to charge Norfolk publicly with what he had said. Norfolk 
gave Hereford the lie, and the question was referred to ordeal by battle. 
Thousands of spectators assembled to witness the fight ; the lists were 
prepared and the combatants ready ; when Richard suddenly stopped the 
proceedings and pronounced his own award that both should be banished, 
Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years, though without prejudice to his 
own estates or to his rights of succession when his father, John of Gaunt, 
should die. And now it seemed that nothing stood between Richard and 
such an absolutism as no King of England had ever enjoyed. 

But his finishing stroke had been an act so arbitrary, so utterly impos- 
sible to reconcile with equity, so manifestly and essentially tyrannical, that 
any pretence of constitutionalism on Richard's part was rendered absurd. 
For the brief remainder of his reign Richard acted as an unqualified despot. 
To procure money he raised forced loans and imposed heavy fines upon 
individuals and upon districts which had been in any way implicated 
in any of the so-called treasons of the Lords Appellant. With the funds 
thus procured he raised and maintained a great bodyguard of archers, who 
in effect formed a not inconsiderable standing army at his own immediate 
disposal. The old Duke of Lancaster died and the king seized the inherit- 
ance. And then he betook himself out of England to quell an insurrection 
in Ireland. 

The last step was fatal. Henry of Hereford, robbed of his duchy of 
Lancaster, returned to England, landing at Ravenspur in Yorkshire and 
bringing with him the exiled Archbishop Arundel. He at once proclaimed 
that he had come to demand only his lawful inheritance of Lancaster. He 
was promptly joined by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. 
The Duke of York, acting for the absent Richard, gathered a large force. 
But public sympathy was entirely on the side of the duke, unjustly banished 
and unjustly robbed ; York's musters refused to march against Lancaster. 
York hurried to the west, while Henry marched in the same direction, 
gathering fresh adherents, still proclaiming that for himself he sought only 
his inheritance, though to this demand was now added that of the removal 
of Richard's evil counsellors. York parleyed ; York was convinced ; 
York went over to Lancaster. The few leading adherents of the king in 
the west were captured and executed. 

From Ireland the Earl of Salisbury hurried back to raise forces for 
the king in Wales ; but when Richard himself arrived a fortnight later, 
it was only to find that Salisbury's levies had dispersed again. Then came 
the Earl of Northumberland on Henry's behalf with a proffer of terms — ■ 
the trial of Henry's prominent supporters before parliament, and the 
appointment of Henry himself as Grand Justiciar. The proposals were 
obviously impossible ; but Northumberland effected his real object, which 



1 84 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

was to draw Richard into an ambush of his own followers. The unlucky 
king was carried off to Flint Castle, thence to Chester, and thence to the 
Tower. A parliament was summoned, and the king was forced to sign 
an Act of Abdication. 

An Act of parliament was passed setting forth the reasons for the 
deposition. Henry then advanced and claimed the throne for himself on 
the somewhat amazing plea of his descent, not from Edward III. through 
his father, but through his mother from Edmund Crouchback of Lancaster, 




Richard II., having landed at Milford Haven, goes to his friends at Conway Castle. 
[From a 14th century MS. life of Richard. 1 



the brother of Edward I. ; the pretence being that Edmund was the elder 
brother, but had been set aside on account of deformity. Obviously the 
legitimate heir of Edward III., if Richard were set aside, was the child 
Edmund Mortimer, the great-grandson and representative of Edward's second 
son, Lionel of Clarence ; for it could hardly be pretended that English law 
or custom rejected descent through the female line. Hence this curious 
attempt to create a technical claim going back to Henry III. Parliament 
proceeded to pronounce Henry to be the rightful King of England ; but 
it was the patent fact that technicalities had been set aside, and that Henry 
was king because parliament for whatever reasons chose that he should 
be king — not because he stood next to the Crown in blood. Edmund 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 185 

Mortimer was quietly ignored, although his father Roger, recently slain 
in Ireland, had been recognised before his death as heir-presumptive by 
Richard himself. 



VII 



SCOTLAND 



The period of David Bruce's minority in Scotland was mainly occupied 
with Edward Balliol's attempt to supplant the Bruce dynasty by the help 
of the King of England, and on terms of subjection to the sovereignty 
of England. The great King Robert had effected the task of liberation, 
and the people of Scot- 



THE BRUGES AND STEWARTS 



Robert I. , Bruce, 
1306. 



Marjory, m. 

Walter Fitzalan, 

the High Steward. 

I 

Robert II. , Stewart, 

1370. 



David II., 
1329. 



Robert of Albany 
(Regent), 1406. 



David, Duke of 
Rothesay. 



James I. , 
1423. 



Murdach of 

Albany 

(Regent), 1419. 



John, Earl of Buchan 
(Victor of Bauge). 



land were resolved that, 
whatever it cost them, 
they would not submit 
to a foreign yoke. After 
Randolph's death no 
statesman and no soldier 
appeared capable of or- 
ganising the govern- 
ment Or Of repeating Robert III. (John), 1390, 

the military triumphs of 
Bruce and his captains. 
When Scottish and 
English armies met in 
the field, the Scots 

leaders invariably failed to apply the lessons of Bannockburn ; and the 
Scots people would not learn the use of the bow. The victory was 
always won by the English archers. But if they were beaten in the 
field, the Scots still carried on the stubborn guerilla warfare at which they 
had become adepts ; and the moment that active English aid was with- 
drawn from Balliol he was again driven out of the country. 

Five years after his return to Scotland, David Bruce as the ally of 
France invaded the north of England, whereupon his army was routed and 
he himself was taken prisoner, at the battle of Neville's Cross. For eleven 
years he remained a captive in England. During that time the government 
of Scotland was in the hands of his nephew, Robert Fitzalan the Steward, 
the son of his elder sister Marjory Bruce, and heir to the throne if David 
should predecease him without leaving offspring. Robert was not a strong 
ruler, and was powerless to check the dangers of that development of 
feudalism in Scotland which defied all efforts to establish a strong central 
government. The nobles were individually too powerful and too jealous 
of each other to devote themselves to national interests ; there were always 
some among them ready to enter into a " band " against any government 



i86 



NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 



in which they were not themselves predominant ; ready even to intrigue 
with England for their own ends. There were always others who were 
ready to reconcile private enmities in the face of an English attack — but for 
no other reason. But below the ranks of the nobility, the Scottish people, 
the most independent in the world, were absolutely resolved to fight to 
the last gasp against English dominion. And it was to this fact that 
Scotland owed the preservation of her independence. 

While the truce lasted between England and France there was truce 

also between England and Scotland. In 1354 
terms were also arrived at for the liberation of 
King David. But in the next year the French 
war broke out again, the Scots attacked 
Berwick, and in 1356 the King of England 
took his revenge in the Burnt Candlemas. 
This was at last followed by a treaty which 
set David free but bound Scotland to pay a 
ransom of a hundred thousand marks. Tre- 
mendous as was the taxation involved for a 
country so poor as Scotland, David never- 
theless made matters worse by indulging him- 
self in the most extravagant expenditure. The 
king even went so far as to propose the 
purchase of the remission of the ransom by 
recognising as his heir Lionel of Clarence, the 
second son of the King of England, in place 
of Robert the Steward or Stewart ; but the 
proposal was received by the Estates with a 
flat refusal which demonstrated once for all 
the intensity of the national feeling on the 
subject. 

The pressure of taxation, and the king's 
need of money, gave to the Scottish Estates new powers of control, as 
with the English parliament. The Scots parliament, however, was not 
organised like that of England, and tended to delegate its powers to 
committees which for practical purposes replaced the assemblies of the 
Estates ; and thus the political functions of parliament came gradually to 
be exercised by a standing committee known as the Lords of the Articles. 

In 1 371 David died without legitimate offspring, and was succeeded by 
Robert II., the first of the Stewart line. Robert's father was Walter 
Fitzalan, the husband of the great King Robert's daughter Marjory, and 
hereditary High Steward of the kingdom ; of Norman lineage, connected 
with the English house of Arundel. For twelve years there was nominally 
truce with England ; but both at sea and on the borders almost perpetual 
warfare prevailed in practice, which was officially condemned but was 
allowed to take its course by both governments. It was with a view 




Edward III. and David of Scotland 
[From the Articles of the Peace of 1357.] 



EDWARD III. AND RICHARD II. 187 

to terminating this unsatisfactory state of things that John of Gaunt had 
gone to Scotland when the Peasant Revolt broke out in England. Robert 
himself was anxious to preserve peace, but was unable to restrain the 
nobles. Raids and counter raids in 1384 and 1385 were followed by 
Richard's invasion in company with Lancaster ; when the Scots lords left 
the English to follow their own devices, but themselves carried out a very 
effective counter raid in Cumberland and Westmorland. In the following 
year the Scots were the aggressors, and the campaign culminated in the 
famous moonlight fight of Otterburn, celebrated without much regard to 
strict historical accuracy in the ballads of Otterburn and Chevy Chace. The 
victory lay with the Scots, who carried off among their prisoners Harry 
Hotspur, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, though their own leader, 
James Douglas, was slain on the field. Soon after this there was a new 
treaty of peace, which was not preserved immaculately but terminated open 
hostilities on a large scale. 

In 1390 the old king died, and was succeeded by his eldest son John, 
who took the name of Robert III. to avert the ill-luck associated with the 
names of the three kings who bore the name of John in England, France, 
and Scotland. To his melancholy reign belong the events celebrated in 
Sir Walter Scott's Fair Maid of Perth, the battle on the North Inch between 
the clans Chattan and Kay, and the death of the king's eldest son, David 
Duke of Rothesay, who was popularly believed to have been starved to 
death by his uncle, the king's brother, Robert Duke of Albany. This event 
took place in 1402, shortly after the accession of Henry IV. in England, 
and made the king's second son, the child James, heir to the throne of 
Scotland. 



CHAPTER VII 

LANCASTER AND YORK 
I 

HENRY IV 

Henry Duke of Lancaster was in plain terms a usurper who seized the 
Crown by violence and secured it, so far as it was secured, by a parlia- 
mentary title. The lawful king was deposed and the nearest lawful heir 
was passed over. No one believed the fiction concerning Edmund 
Crouchback ; a name which in fact merely meant that that prince had 
worn the Cross of the Crusaders on his back, not that he was deformed. 
Nobody denied that in England the succession to the Crown had followed 
the female line. The first Plantagenet had succeeded because his mother 
was a daughter of the King of England. The last Plantagenet but one had 
claimed the French Crown because his mother was the daughter of a King 
of France. If, therefore, Henry's title was valid at all, it was on the ancient 
principle that the Great Council of the realm was entitled to fix the 
succession, though precisely two hundred years had passed since it had 
exercised that power by preferring John to his elder brother's son. The 
power of deposition was also implied in the circumstances. Since, then, 
Henry occupied the throne by favour of parliament, it was imperative that 
he should retain the favour of parliament. The Lancastrian kings did not 
wish to strengthen parliament as against the royal powers ; but they could 
not escape from the necessity of keeping parliament on their own side. 

" Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown " — the more so when the Crown 
has been usurped. Henry owed his victory very largely to the Earls of 
Northumberland and Westmorland, a Percy and a Neville, with the Arundels 
and the Staffords ; the last family representing the house of Thomas of 
Gloucester. For the moment all these were loyal to the king they had set 
up. But within a few weeks Richard's closest supporters were conspiring 
for his restoration — the Hollands, stepsons of the Black Prince, who held 
the earldoms of Kent and of Huntingdon, Salisbury and others. The plot 
was betrayed by their half-hearted confederate, Edward Earl of Rutland, son 
of the Duke of York. The conspirators were captured and beheaded. But 
in the meantime Richard himself was dead ; there is no real doubt that he 
had in fact been murdered ; and his body was now exposed to public view 
in order to demonstrate his decease. The fact did not prevent a fictitious 

188 



LANCASTER AND YORK 189 

Richard from appearing later as a pretender ; since a report was put about 
that the corpse exposed had been that of a chaplain of the former king, to 
whom he had borne an extraordinary personal resemblance. 

Next came a rising of the Welsh, with whom Richard had been popular. 
They were led by Owen Glen dower, a gentleman of the house of Llewelyn, 
who proclaimed himself Prince of North Wales and the loyal vassal of King 
Richard, whose death he denied. His sway was recognised over the greater 
part of the principality, and Henry never succeeded in putting him down 
thoroughly. France and Scotland were astir again, the French court having 
for excuse the fact that Richard, shortly before his fall, had married a French 
princess. The Scots gathered a great force, led by Murdach of Albany, King 
Robert's nephew. At Homildon Hill they were utterly routed in much the 
same fashion as at Halidon Hill some seventy years before; Murdach of 
Albany, Douglas, and two other earls were taken prisoner by the Percies. 
Henry was badly in want of money, and desperately anxious to avoid irritat- 
ing parliament by asking for it. The Percies were presuming on the help 
they had given him, and their achievement at Homildon Hill was by no 
means to the king's liking. He required them to hand over their Scottish 
prisoners, and claimed the ransoms for himself. 

The Percies took the act as a warning or a challenge, released Douglas 
unransomed, and entered upon a bond with him and Glendower to over- 
turn Henry, and make young Edmund Mortimer king, if Richard was really 
dead. Hotspur's wife was herself a Mortimer. Thomas Percy, Earl of 
Worcester, joined with his kinsmen of Northumberland. Hotspur and 
Douglas marched to join forces with Glendower ; but Henry caught the 
northern force at Shrewsbury before the junction could be effected ; and an 
extremely sanguinary battle ended with a decisive victory for the king. 
Hotspur was slain on the field, Douglas was for the second time made 
captive, and Worcester also was taken and executed. Young Prince Henry 
of Wales, a boy of fifteen, here saw his first stricken field. Shakespeare 
treated the episode as a dramatist, not as a historian. Hotspur did not fall 
in single combat with Prince Hal ; a stray arrow killed him. 

The Earl of Northumberland had not marched with Hotspur ; he 
succeeded in making his peace with the king by payment of a heavy fine. 
But he was still meditating revenge, and in 1405, two years after Shrews- 
bury, he worked up afresh rebellion with the aid of the Earl of Nottingham, 
the son of Henry's old colleague and opponent Thomas Mowbray of Norfolk, 
and the Archbishop of York, whose cousin, the Earl of Wiltshire, Henry had 
executed as one of Richard's " evil counsellors." By fair words and promises, 
however, the rebels were persuaded to disband their forces ; whereupon 
they were arrested and executed. Northumberland himself effected his 
escape, but only to fall two years later at Bramham Moor in a third 
attempt at insurrection. 

The danger which had threatened from France soon came to an end, 
since that country fell into a miserable state of anarchy and internal discord 



i 9 o NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

under the nominal rule of a king who was generally quite insane and at his 
best was an imbecile. The Orleanist and Burgundian branches of the royal 
family intrigued and fought for supremacy with every circumstance of 
treachery and violence. Scotland was paralysed for action by an accident. 
The old king sent off the Crown Prince James to be educated in France, 
fearing, perhaps, that he would meet with the same fate as Rothesay at the 
hands of his ambitious uncle of Albany. The boy did not reach France, 
as the ship in which he sailed was captured by the English ; and young 
James was detained, and held for eighteen years as a hostage for Scotland's 
good behaviour. The unexpected blow killed old King Robert ; Albany as 
a matter of course became regent, and Albany did not in the least wish to 
see his nephew at liberty. After the crushing of two rebellions there was 
no great danger that a third would be successful ; and after Bramham Moor 
the persistent defiance of Glendower in Wales remained the only constant 
source whence danger might suddenly spring. There were no more active 
insurrections. Edmund Mortimer was in the king's hands, so that a revolt in 
the boy's favour was out of the question. 

Throughout the first year of his reign it was of vital importance to 
Henry to secure both clerical and popular support. We have remarked 
on the increase of anti-clericalism and the spread of Lollardry during 
Richard's reign ; and it might at first sight appear that clerical and popular 
favour could hardly be associated. But the popular Lollardry did not 
concern itself with theology. The followers of Wiclif might be attacked 
for their heresies without offending popular feeling, and with the entire 
approval of the clergy. Hence the second year of Henry's reign saw 
the passing of the Act De Heretico Comburendo, by which for the first time 
death at the stake was introduced as the punishment for heresy. Even 
while the Act was being passed its first victim, William Sawtre, was martyred. 
Archbishop Arundel, the prime mover, was constant in urging that in fact 
Lollardry was an offence not merely against the Church but against society, 
that it was not merely heresy but anarchism. It was only twenty years 
since the Peasant Revolt, and the propertied classes felt the force of the 
appeal. The persecution of heresy did not as yet become systematic ; it 
aroused no antagonism ; it satisfied the clergy that Henry was a loyal 
son of the Church ; but it did not mean that the clergy had become 
popular. The orthodox Commons, who were quite ready to burn their 
neighbours for unorthodox views on abstract questions, did not in conse- 
quence relax the austerity of their opinions as to clerical worldliness, or 
their conviction that the Church was disproportionately endowed with this 
world's goods. Twice during the reign proposals were brought forward 
by the Commons for wholesale confiscations of ecclesiastical property, 
though their petitions were rejected. 

The Commons, in fact, took very good care to make the king feel his 
dependence upon them. They grumbled over every appeal for financial 
aid, while the interminable operations against Glendower in Wales were a 



LANCASTER AND YORK 



191 



perpetual drain upon the Treasury. Henry was obliged at their instance to 
submit to the appointment of a Council, which at least seriously curtailed 
his freedom of action. They insisted successfully on their right to examine 
the account of the expenditure of their grants. They insisted, too, on their 
exclusive right to originate money grants, when the king had ventured 
to name the amount of the tax which he thought advisable. The Commons, 
in fact, during the reign of Henry IV. claimed and exercised an unprece- 
dented amount of control, which the weakness of 
the king's title compelled him to concede. 

In the latter years of the reign, the Prince of 
Wales took an exceedingly active part in politics ; 
and it was certainly due to his personal energy that 
the irrepressible Glendower was held in check, 
and reduced from the position of an almost in- 
dependent prince to that of a troublesome outlaw. 
The legends of the doings of the wild Prince 
Hal immortalised by Shakespeare are not to be 
simply set on one side. Contemporary chroniclers 
are quite definite in declaring that his character 
changed when he came to the throne, that his 
accession was viewed with some anxiety, and that 
he was given to a wildness which contrasted with 
the personal austerity of his later life. The legend of his behaviour to Judge 
Gascoigne is almost certainly a fiction, based upon an actual incident in the 
life of Edward II. But such legends, however inaccurate in detail, can only 
be accounted for because they were appropriate to the character popularly 
attributed to the Prince ; and such popular estimates are apt to be funda- 
mentally sound. Still it is absolutely clear that the Prince indulged himself 
only in the intervals of strenuous and responsible work ; that he was not a 
wildly irresponsible boy who merely showed himself capable of better 
things on an occasional emergency. Henry V. had many of the qualities 
of a Puritan fanatic, which are by no means inconsistent with a degree of 
youthful dissipation ; and to Henry, as to many a Puritan, came a moment 
which marked a decisive change in the manner of his life ; the moment 
when his father died worn out by disease, and he himself became King of 
England at the age of five and twenty. 




An abbot travelling. 



II 

HENRY V 



Richard II., Henry V., and Richard III. will remain for all time in 
popular imagination the kings conceived by Shakespeare. We may explain, 
we may criticise, we may demonstrate anything we like as logically as we 



192 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

please, but Shakespeare will remain convincing. Shakespeare elected to 
draw Henry V. on traditional lines, and there is no character, certainly no 
male character, in all the plays in whom the great dramatist took a more 
unqualified delight. He is Shakespeare's " Happy Warrior," though we 
may find some difficulty in exactly appropriating Wordsworth's lines to him. 
Shakespeare's play is a panegyric of the hero king. 

Nevertheless the historian is apt to resent such panegyrics, to suggest 
that the ambition of Henry V., like the wrath of Achilles, was the cause of 
woes unnumbered, and quite needlessly despatched to Hades many valiant 
souls of heroes. Some historians go further and denounce in Henry a type 
of false ideals, honoured only by reason of the deceptive glamour which 
attends the achievement of brilliant feats of arms ; finding in him nothing 
better than a re-incarnation of Edward III. But in fact it is possible to 
admit that Shakespeare idealised his hero, and at the same time to realise 
that essentially much of the criticism is beside the mark. 

Of Henry's reign there are two prominent features, the persecution of 
Lollardry, and the French war. Concerning the former Shakespeare has 
nothing to say ; but if we have read Henry correctly, both were the out- 
come of the same conviction, crystallised in Henry's mind when he became 
actually King of England, that he was an instrument in the hands of the 
Almighty. Reigning in virtue of his father's usurpation of the throne, 
conscious that the throne had been won in defiance of legality, mere legality 
counted for very little in his eyes. The Almighty had set him on the 
throne of England because He had chosen him to accomplish His work. 
The work to be accomplished was for a mind of Henry's type promptly 
identified with the work which ambition suggested. France had fallen upon 
evil days and the iniquities of her rulers cried to Heaven. Henry was the 
instrument whereby those iniquities were to be punished ; France was 
to be brought under a righteous rule, and then probably France and 
England, led by one Christian king, were to turn their arms against the 
Turk, drive him from Europe, and recover the Holy Land for Christendom. 
As for legality, any colour of it would suffice for his purposes ; though for 
form's sake some pretence of legal right had to be asserted. Here was the 
work of God's appointed champion, and the methods by which it must be 
carried out were those of statecraft and soldiership. Given the point of 
view there is little difficulty in understanding that from first to last Henry 
was perfectly satisfied as to the righteousness both of his ends and of 
his methods. His persecution of Lollardry was an incidental necessity. 
It was the stern duty of God's champion to stamp out heresy ; the persecu- 
tion was not as with his father a mere political expedient for conciliating 
the Church. In carrying out his task the hand of Justice should be ruth- 
less — but it should be the hand of Justice. 

Critics have seen in Henry's French war mere wanton aggression ii 
spired by the weakness of the neighbouring country ; and a total lack 
statesmanship, since the union of France and England as a single dominioi 



LANCASTER AND YORK 193 

was wholly impracticable. It was in fact impracticable because it ran 
counter to the idea of nationalism, an insuperable natural dividing force ; 
or a force which at the present day seems to be insuperable, because 
we live at a time when nationalism dominates European politics. But 
nationalism had not dominated European politics at the beginning of the 
fifteenth century. England, Scotland, and France had indeed developed 
the spirit of nationality, but the idea that nationalities, however diverse, 
could not be effectively combined in a single dominion, would have 
appealed to no medieval statesman ; and it is somewhat absurd to deny 
statesmanship to a medieval monarch because he had not grasped the 
truth which half the chancellories of Europe were still unable to recognise 
four hundred years afterwards. Only a hundred years before, Edward I. 
had made with regard to Scotland the same mistake which Henry made 
with regard to France ; and English historians at least are not in the habit 
of denying the name of statesman to Edward I. 

Henry's attack on Lollardry is apt to escape attention chiefly because it 
was systematic, brief, and effective. His father had merely allowed the 
churchmen to strike down a few insignificant persons. Lollardry in high 
places was winked at. The new king struck at once at Lord Cobham, the 
one peer who had identified himself with the new doctrines. Cobham was 
tried, condemned, and thrown into prison. He broke prison and escaped 
into hiding. His escape was immediately followed by a wild plot on the 
part of the Lollards, who planned an insurrection. The young king got 
wind of the plo| and effected a night surprise of the mustering rebels, of 
whom thirty-seven were promptly hanged. It was immediately realised 
that the law against heresy would be enforced with vigour, and the voices 
of the Lollards were practically silenced, although it was not till some time 
later that Cobham himself was captured for the second time, and died a 
martyr. 

But the Crown of France was the great prize which Henry had set him- 
self to win. That country was rent by the two factions of the Orleanists 
and Burgundians. Each during the last reign had sought the help of the 
King of England by promising the restitution of provinces in France. Some 
inadequate help had been given first to one and then to the other. But 
Henry V. had no idea of being satisfied with what one party or the other 
would surrender as the price of his support. Before he had been a year on 
the throne he put forward the old claim of the King of England to the 
Crown of France ; though this was made ridiculous by the fact that the 
law of succession on which that claim was based would have placed on 
the French throne, not Henry, but his cousin the Earl of March. However, 
he professed himself willing to withdraw that claim if France ceded to him 
something more than all the territories ever held in France by any Planta- 
genet, together with the hand of the French princess Catherine. In return 
the French government made very extensive proffers ; but they could not 
have baulked Henry by anything short of taking him at his word, and con- 

N 



194 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

ceding the whole of his alternative demand — which was obviously out of the 
question. He had made it simply because he knew that to concede it was 
out of the question. He rejected the French terms, and announced solemnly 
that the responsibility for what was to follow lay with France. 

Meanwhile parliament had endorsed the king's designs by making a very 
substantial grant. There was no difficulty in raising forces, for the war was 
popular. Nothing was to be feared from Scotland, since Albany and his 
supporters were afraid of having King James returned on their hands if they 
offended the King of England, while their enemies were afraid that the 
captive monarch would be made to pay the penalty if they attacked England. 
In Wales, though Glendower was still alive, he had now ceased to be danger- 
ous ; so Henry had a clear field for his French operations. He could even 

THE HOUSES OF YORK AND LANCASTER 
Edward III. 



Lionel of Clarence. 



John of Gaunt. 



Edmund of York. 



Philippa, m. 
Edmund 
Mortimer. 

I 
Roger 

Mortimer. 



Henry IV., 

1399- 

I 

Henry V. 

I4I3- 

Henry VI., 
1422. 



Beauforts. 



Edward, 
Duke of 

York. 



Edmund, 
Earl of 
March. 



Anne, m. 

Richard, 

Earl of 

Cambridge. 

I 

Richard, Duke of 

York. -> 



Henry VII. 



Richard, 

Earl of 

Cambridge, m. 

Anne Mortimer. 

I 

Richard, Duke 

of York. 



Edward IV., 
1461. 



Thomas of Woodstock, 
or Gloucester. 
I 
Anne, m. 
Earl of Stafford. 

I . 
Duke of Buckingham. 



count on the loyalty of the young Earl of March ; and so long as that was 
the case conspiracies against the Lancastrian dynasty could not constitute a 
serious danger. 

Such a conspiracy was, however, actually formed by Richard, Earl of 
Cambridge, brother of the Duke of York of whom mention was made in the 
last reign when he was Earl of Rutland — the son of the old Duke Edmund of 
York, the uncle of Richard II. Richard of Cambridge had married Anne 
Mortimer, sister of the Earl of March, so that as it happened the Mortimer 
claim to the Crown ultimately passed to his own offspring. March, however, 
on being invited to join the plot, which without his approval was bound to 
come to nothing, refused, and carried the matter to the king ; and the con- 
spirators were seized, tried by their peers, and executed. 

A week later Henry's army of invasion set sail from Southampton, and 
immediately sat down to besiege Harfleur. 

Henry had no idea of miscellaneous raiding. With a military instinct 
far superior to that of his predecessors, he aimed at a systematic war of 




A medieval siege engine. 



LANCASTER AND YORK 195 

conquest ; of bringing the land into his obedience piecemeal. He antici- 
pated a war of sieges ; but he did not anticipate stout resistance, because 
Burgundy was half disposed in his favour and would certainly lend no 
appreciable help to the Orleanists with 
whom the Dauphin Louis had thrown in 
his lot. After a three weeks' siege Harfleur 
surrendered. 

Henry's army, however, had suffered 
very severely, not from fighting, but from 
disease. Though no attempt had been 
made to relieve Harfleur, the Dauphin and 
Orleans had collected a considerable force, 
and it was clear that Henry, after garrison- 
ing Harfleur, would have an army quite 
inadequate to carrying out his original pro- 
gramme. The obvious course in the cir- 
cumstances was to make Harfleur secure 
and withdraw the rest of the army to 
England ; but Henry resolved that instead 
of simply embarking his troops he would 
march through Normandy to Calais. The 
motive is not clear. Probably he reckoned 
on winning prestige for himself and bringing discredit on the French 
government Hy making the march unmolested. He may have had with 
him, at the highest estimate, eight thousand men, five-sixths of the force 
being archers, and many of these must have been suffering from sickness. 

Something very like the Crecy 
record was repeated. The 
French army, though very 
much larger, did not attempt 
to force a battle, but endea- 
voured to prevent the passage 
oftheSomme. But when this 
was effected at an unguarded 
spot, Orleans felt that he must 
strike. The anarch had given 
time for large French rein- 
forcementsto come up, and on 
the night of October 24th the 
English found their advance 
blocked by the French masses. 
On the day of battle the English were formed very much as at Crecy ; 
the French also were dismounted, and in three masses, one behind the 
other, since the ground did not permit of an extended front or of a flank 
movement. On their front, however, were two squadrons of horse, who 




A battering-ram and its use. 



196 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

were intended to charge upon the archers. Between the two armies lay 
heavy plough land. Neither at first would advance to the attack, but 
Henry knew that he must force a battle or perish. The English line began 
to move forward. But the French would no longer be restrained. The 
cavalry attempted to charge, the French van rolling on behind them. But 
the archers were prepared with an improvised palisade of pointed stakes. 
They halted, thrust these into the soft ground, and from behind them 
began to pour forth their arrows on the advancing masses. The cavalry 

were rolled over ; 
the heavy armed in- 
fantry pressing for- 
ward were flung into 
confusion. The 
English archers and 
men-at-arms fell 
upon them, hewed 
them down, and 
hurled themselves 
upon the second line, 
which in turn broke 
and scattered after 
a brief resistance. 






o. 



BATTLE OF 

AGINCOURT 

I I French men-at-arms dismounted 

S French men-at-arms mounted. 



Ql 



English Archers 

English men-at-arms dismounted 




**: 



The third line was 

seized with panic. A 

the English baggage and 



Disposition of English and French forces at Agincourt. 

report that the French force had fallen upon 
was threatening the rear caused the order to be given that every man 
was to slay his prisoners ; an order which it is possible to condone, 
seeing that the prisoners were at least as numerous as the captors. But 
the result was a tremendous slaughter. The French slain outnumbered the 
entire English force, and among them were fifteen hundred nobles or 
knights. It seems practically certain that of the English not more than six 
score were killed all told : York and Suffolk were the only noblemen. 
Henry continued his march to Calais, and was received in London with 
a wild burst of enthusiasm. 

Almost two years had passed before Henry was ready for his second 
invasion. The first had taught him the magnitude of his task ; and the 
fame he had won at Agincourt made anything mote in the shape of fool- 
hardy feats of arms entirely superfluous. This time conquest was to be 
systematic and thorough. Meanwhile two French Dauphins had died, 
and a third brother, Charles, now heir to the French throne, was as 
completely in the hands of the Armagnacs, as the Orleanists were now 
termed, as his predecessors. Orleans himself was one of the comparatively 
few prisoners whose lives had been preserved at Agincourt. Burgundy's 
neutrality at least could be relied on, and he was in fact at open war with 
the Armagnac government. When Henry landed again in Normandy, 



LANCASTER AND YORK 1 97 

there was no present prospect that the army of France would interfere 
with him. What he had to do was to subdue Normandy. He set about 
the conquest city by city. He kept his troops under a discipline almost 
without parallel in medieval warfare, and punished anything in the shape 
of outrages on the civil population with a heavy hand. In a couple of 
months half the towns of Normandy had surrendered, and the French 
queen had joined Burgundy, 
claiming the regency for her- 
self in priority to the Dauphin, 
whom she detested. The con- 
quest of Normandy continued, 
and while Henry garrisoned 
town after town he made no 
infringement on their accus- 
tomed liberties or rights. 

In the summer he began 
the siege of Rouen, the capital 
of the duchy. Summer waned, 
the autumnadvanced,andpassed 
into winter ; the warring factions 
of France both endeavoured to 
negotiate, and while they negoti- 
ated Rouen was drawing nearer 
to the starvation point. The 
only attempt at relief was a 
raid easily beaten off. The in- 
habitants of Rouen drove some 
thousands of non-combatants 
out of their gates. Henry re- 
fused to let them through his 
lines, and the merciless business 
of starvation went on, relieved 
only when the English king 
provided the miserable people 
with a Christmas dinner. In 




The siege of Rouen by Henry V. 



January Rouen surrendered, and after that the rest of Normandy gave 
little serious trouble, though there remained fortresses which still held out 
for some months. 

Burgundy renewed negotiations, but the more that he and the queen 
seemed inclined to concede, the higher grew the terms demanded by 
Henry. At last Burgundy resolved to have done with it and to make his 
•peace with the Armagnacs. There was an apparent reconciliation between 
Burgundy and Charles ; but immediately afterwards the Duke was foully 
murdered by the treachery of the Dauphin at Montereau. In his young 
successor Philip, and indeed among all the Burgundians, the desire for 



198 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

revenge mastered every other sentiment. They immediately concluded for 
their own part a truce with the King of England so far as all Burgundian 
territories were affected. The queen was on their side, the crazy king and 
the princess Catherine were both in their hands. In the spring of next 
year, 1420, they concluded with Henry the treaty of Troyes, under which 
he received Catherine as his bride, the guardianship of the kingdom during 
the life of the reigning King Charles VI., and the promise of the succession 
for himself and his heirs after the king's death, to the displacement of the 
Dauphin. France was to retain her own laws, customs, and government ; 
there was merely to be an ultimate union of crowns like that which 
took place between England and Scotland, not in 1707, but in 1603. 

A few months later Henry withdrew to England, leaving in charge his 
next brother, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. His long absence was being felt 
at home. Nevertheless he was back in six months again ; for Clarence by 
a rash movement brought upon himself an overwhelming defeat and lost 
his own life at the battle of Bauge, a victory mainly won by a large 
contingent of Scots who had taken service with the French. New life was 
given to the party of the Dauphin ; through the latter part of the year and 
the first half of the following year, 1422, Henry was engaged in pushing 
forward his conquest. In the meantime Catherine had borne him a son. 
He himself was a young man not yet five and thirty, and it is impossible to 
guess what he might have effected if he had lived another twenty years in 
full vigour. But the hand of death was upon him. He contracted a fatal 
disease, of which he died in August of the same year, leaving instructions 
that his next brother, John, Duke of Bedford, should act as a regent of 
France, and his younger brother, Humphrey of Gloucester, as regent of 
England. 

Ill 

THE LOSS OF FRANCE 

Whether Henry V., if he had lived to the age of Edward I., could have 
succeeded in the policy of uniting England and France on the lines of the treaty 
of Troyes, is sufficiently doubtful ; when he died at the age of thirty-four, the 
possibility of success disappeared. A king with a character and genius equal 
to Henry's was needed to carry out his work effectively. The man who 
was actually left to carry it out was hardly the inferior of Henry himself, 
whether in character or in military or political ability. But he would seem 
to have lacked the magnetic personality of Henry the Conqueror, and he 
was not a king. John, Duke of Bedford, though he was trusted and 
admired on all hands, yet lacked the royal authority ; and lacking it, the 
task for him became impossible. And yet it was not till his death, thirteen 
years after that of Henry, that the sheer impossibility of it became 
manifest. 



LANCASTER AND YORK 199 

It is clear enough that the conquest of a united France by England 
could only have been accomplished by a miracle. Henry himself would 
hardly have achieved what he did if the murder at Montereau had not 
turned the new Duke of Burgundy into his active ally. If the Dauphin 
Charles had been an able and vigorous prince, if he had striven for a real 
reconciliation between Burgundians and Armagnacs, instead of lending 
himself to the monstrous treachery which almost justified Burgundy in 
siding with a foreign conqueror, Henry's conquest might have been 
restricted to Normandy. But even before and still more after Montereau, 
the France with which the English had to deal was disunited ; and while 
Burgundy was definitely on the side of England, it was always possible that 
the Plantagenet might overthrow the Valois claimant of the French 
throne. 

But the Burgundian alliance was immediately weakened by the action 
of Humphrey of Gloucester. The Duke of Brabant was a kinsman and 
ally of Philip of Burgundy. He had got possession of Hainault by marry- 
ing its heiress Jacquelaine, who not without reason sought a divorce from 
him. Gloucester wished to marry her and get Hainault for himself. Philip 
espoused the cause of the Duke of Brabant. Jacquelaine got her divorce, 
but only from the ex-pope who had been deposed by the Council of 
Constance. Nevertheless Gloucester married her, and tried to recover 
Hainault from the Duke of Brabant. It was all that Bedford's diplomacy 
could effect to prevent an open rupture between England and Burgundy. 

Nevertheless for some time the slow process of conquest went on. The 
unhappy King Charles VI. died just after Henry V. ; and the north of 
France recognised the infant Henry VI. as king, and Bedford as regent. 
The south recognised Charles VII. Bedford won brilliant victories at 
Crevant and Verneuil ; and in 1428 the siege of Orleans began. Through 
the winter the siege went on, but it was not destined to be successful. 
France was redeemed by the heroism of a girl whom the English burnt 
as a sorceress, since otherwise they must have acknowledged her for God's 
angel sent for the deliverance of France. Modern wisdom escapes the 
dilemma by classing her as an unexplained psychological phenomenon; 
but the Middle Ages explained such phenomena by referring them to the 
direct intervention of God or the Devil. But however we may elect to in- 
terpret Joan of Arc, we may at least be perfectly certain that her interpreta- 
tion by the English and by Shakespeare was hideously and fearfully wrong. 

To the court of Charles VII. at Chinon came a country maid, Jeanne 
Dare, from Domremy, in Picardy. To her, she said, had come voices and 
visions, bidding her arise and save France. For herself she asked nothing 
but to be suffered to obey the Divine command. Common sense scoffed, 
but common sense was somehow silenced. She got her way, and sallied 
from Chinon at the head of an armed force. She reached Orleans and 
entered it without difficulty, for the investment was incomplete. The garri- 
son became inspired, and upon the English fell a terror of they knew not 



2oo NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

what ; art magic they called it. The Maid could not be resisted. The 
English force had never been strong enough to effect a complete blockade ; 
now it could not even hold its own against the onslaughts of the garrison. 
The siege was broken up. At Pataye, Joan met the English in the open 
field and routed them. Then through a hostile country she accompanied 
Charles to Rheims to crown him King of France. Her work as she under- 
stood it was now done, but Charles could not dispense with so valuable an 
asset. He would not suffer her to depart as she herself desired. For a 
year she continued to lead French forces to victory in repeated skirmishes 
and sieges ; but at last she fell into the hands of the Burgundians, through 
the treachery, it was said, of jealous Frenchmen. By a French ecclesiastical 
court she was tried and condemned on charges of heresy and witchcraft. 
Then she was handed over to the English for the execution of the sen- 
tence, and was burnt at the stake to the eternal shame of every one concerned ; 
of the judges who condemned her, of the English who slew her in a fever 
of superstitious terror, of the contemptible king who left her to her doom 
without stirring a finger to save her. The death of the Maid of Orleans is 
the one blot on the fair fame of the Duke of Bedford. 

The cause for which the Maid died was still very far from being won. 
But she had wrought a vital change. She had revived the spirit of patriot- 
ism in the French, and destroyed the self-confidence of the English. 
Success departed from them. They fought on obstinately, but no longer 
with the old assurance of victory. Burgundy was less than half-hearted, 
and began to be anxious to put an end to the war. At last, in 1435, there 
was a conference at Arras, at which it was proposed on the part of the 
French that England should retain the Calais Pale, Normandy, and 
Guienne, but should resign the claim to the French throne. Yet English 
obstinacy rejected the terms. Burgundy in disgust threw up the alliance, 
and France was at last united in resistance to England, which by the 
death of Bedford in 1436 lost the one man who might have saved it from 
the woes to come. 

The war dragged on, but it was now one not for the conquest of new 
territory by the English, but for the recovery of conquered territory by the 
French. The French offer was renewed in 1439, but England still refused 
to resign Henry's claim to call himself King of France. The French began 
to attack Guienne, which had been for a long time in peaceful occupation, 
free from attack because the French forces had been too thoroughly 
engaged elsewhere. Guienne, it must be remembered, was not a conquered 
territory, but had always been technically subject to the King of England as 
its Duke. But before proceeding further with the story of the loss of France, 
we must turn back to affairs in England. 

Of the three brothers of Henry V., the eldest, Thomas of Clarence, was 
killed at Bauge. The dying king had desired that the active work of establish- 
ing the English crown in France should be entrusted to his next brother, 
John of Bedford, while the third, Humphrey of Gloucester, was to be regent 




Besieging a French town at the end of the Hundred Years' War 
f From Froissarfs picture of the siege of Dieppe by Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, I443 - 3 . ] 



202 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

in England. The infant Henry VI. was to be placed in the care of the 
Beauforts. The Beauforts were the nearest kin of the house of Lancaster. 
They were the illegitimate children of John of Gaunt, who, however, ultimately 
married their mother, Catherine Swinford, and the Beauforts were legiti- 
mised by Act of parliament in the reign of Richard II.; an Act which was 
confirmed in the reign of Henry IV., but with the addition of a clause which 
barred them from the succession to the crown. The point is of importance, 
because it still remained possible for the Beauforts to maintain a sort of 
claim to represent the house of Lancaster on the failure of direct heirs to 
Henry IV. There were three brothers : Henry, Bishop of Winchester, who 
became a Cardinal ; Thomas of Exeter ; and John, Earl of Somerset, from 
whom descended the other representatives of the name. Henry of Winchester 
was a prominent member of the Council — a rival of Archbishop Arundel, 

THE BEAUFORTS AND STAFFORDS 
Edward III. 



1 

John of Gaunt, 

Duke of Lancaster, 

and Catherine Swynford. 




1 

Thomas of Woodstock 

Anne, m. 
Earl of Stafford. 


1 
Cardinal Beaufort. 


1 i 
John, Earl of Thomas, Duke of 
Somerset. Exeter. 
1 


1 

Joan, m. 
James I. of 
Scotland. 

I 


Humphrey, Duke of 

Buckingham. 

1 


1 

John, Duke of 

Somerset. 

1 

Margaret, m. 

Edmund Tudor, 

Earl of Richmond. 

1 
Henry VII. , Tudor 


1 

Edmund, Duke of 

Somerset. 

1 

Margaret, m. 

Humphrey Stafford. 

1 


Humphrey, m. 
Margaret Beaufort. 

1 

Henry, Duke of 

Buckingham. 



and an ally of the Prince of Wales during the reign of Henry IV. He 
became Chancellor under Henry V., and remained in the front rank of 
English politics until shortly before his death in 1447. Thomas of Exeter 
was made the actual guardian of the infant king, but he died shortly after- 
wards. John of Somerset was never personally prominent. His daughter 
Joan was married to young King James of Scotland, who was liberated and 
allowed to return to his kingdom immediately after the death of Henry V. 
Her two brothers, John and Edmund, became successively the Earl and 
Duke of Somerset; each left a daughter named Margaret. John's daughter 
became the mother of Henry VIII., while Edmund's daughter was the 
mother of the Duke of Buckingham, who appears first as the ally and then 
as the foe of Richard III. But the Beauforts who appear prominently in 
the reign of Henry VI. are the Cardinal Henry and his nephew Edmund. 

The wishes of Henry V. had of course no legal force. The parliament 
had every confidence in Bedford, and conferred upon him the powers 



V 



U%i 



niMm III , 

m\ fell 



LANCASTER AND YORK 203 

desired by the dying king. It declined, however, to make Humphrey of 
Gloucester regent in England — Bedford's supremacy was to be recognised 
whenever he was in the country — though it made him president of the 
Council to which the regency was committed. This was the continuation 
of that standingCouncil 
which had been nomi- 
nated in the reign of 
Henry IV. that it might 
act as a constitutional 
check on the powers of 
the Crown, though it 
was destined to become 
instead the king's privy 
council of his own 
nominees. For the 
present, however, it 
provided in effect the 
government of Eng- 
land. 

There was no 
thought of challenging 
the succession. The 
Earl of March was 
above suspicion ^f any 
disloyalty. Still, at the 
instance of Gloucester, 
he was sent off to take 
up the government of 
Ireland, where he died 

1 shortly afterwards. The 

: Mortimer heritage and 
claim to the Crown 
passed to his nephew, 
Richard Plantagenet, 
the son of his sister, 
Anne Mortimer, and of 
Richard, Earl of Cam- 
bridge. The child had already become Duke of York by the death of 
his uncle Edward at Agincourt, he being one of the two English noble- 
men who fell in that wonderful battle. Richard of York was eleven 
years old when the king died. 

. Domestic politics produced no events of importance. On the whole 
Gloucester dominated the government, while there was no love lost between 
him and the Beauforts. When Bedford died, the young Duke of York 
was sent to take his place in France, and acquitted himself with very 




Cardinal Beaufort's chauntry in Winchester Cathedral. 



204 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

considerable credit. But by this time, if not before, Cardinal Beaufort had 
become anxious to bring the war to an honourable conclusion, having 
realised the futility of its continuation ; whereas Gloucester courted popu- 
larity by heading the extreme war party who were responsible for the 
rejections of the French overtures which we have noted. He was, however, 
practically driven out of public life for a time by the conduct of his wife, 
Eleanor Cobham, for whom he had deserted Jacquelaine of Hainault. The 
lady had apparently " practised against " the life of the young king by 
necromantic arts, which, however silly, had obviously a treasonable intent, 
Gloucester himself being the heir-presumptive to the throne. The actual 
necromancers were put to death, and the Duchess had to parade London 
robed in the white sheet of repentance. Duke Humphrey was not actually 
an accomplice, but the affair drove him into retirement for some while. 
Although the obstinacy of public sentiment persisted in continuing the 
war, its management and the control of public affairs passed to the 
Beauforts. 

The conduct of war by a ministry who were more anxious for peace 
than for victory was scarcely promising. The fighting was ineffective, and 
efforts were made to negotiate peace, even at the cost of resigning the 
titular claim to the French crown. With a view to peace, a marriage was 
negotiated between the young king Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou, 
the niece of the French king. The mismanagement of the English envoy, 
William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, an ally of the Beauforts, resulted in a 
betrothal and a truce, but nothing more. The tables were turned now, and 
every English proffer of terms was met by a raising of the terms on the 
part of the French. The royal marriage was celebrated in 1446, and in the 
next year both Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort died. There is very 
little doubt that Gloucester was in fact murdered by Somerset and Suffolk 
— a foolish as well as a criminal performance, in which the Cardinal at least, 
being practically in retirement, could have had no hand. So long as 
Henry VI. should be childless, Richard of York was now manifestly the 
next prince of the blood. 

While the truce lasted, shuffling negotiations went on with France, and 
there was intense disgust when it became known that Suffolk had promised 
to evacuate the province of Maine. Still greater was the wrath when 
in 1449 the French renewed the war by invading Normandy in force, and 
overrunning it almost unresisted. Somerset was sent to take command, 
but in the spring of next year his forces were overwhelmed at the battle 
of Formigny. Before the autumn of 1450 nothing remained in France 
to the English except Guienne and the Calais Pale. 

Long before the disaster of Formigny, even before Somerset's ex- 
pedition sailed, popular indignation had risen to rioting point. Somerset 
had hardly landed in France when an angry attack was made by the 
House of Commons on the administration in general and Suffolk in 
particular. All sorts of charges were hurled against him, some serious 



LANCASTER AND YORK 205 

and some absurd, some demonstrably false. Instead of facing trial, Suffolk 
threw himself on the king's mercy. The amiable imbecile on the throne — 
he was the grandson of Charles VI. of France if he was also the son of 
Henry V. of England — thought merely of protecting Suffolk, and attempted 
to do so by banishing him from the kingdom for five years. Again a 
storm of popular indignation broke out. Suffolk fled for his life in 
disguise, but was caught and murdered while trying to cross the Channel. 
The news of Formigny had just arrived, and the murder was merely a 
symptom of popular rage. 

A month later it took shape in the insurrection known as Jack Cade's 
Rebellion, which the tradition followed by Shakespeare has hopelessly 
mixed up with the Peasant Revolt seventy years earlier. In 1450 the 
complaints formulated by the rebels were all directed against the sins 
of the Suffolk-Somerset administration. A casual demand for the repeal 
of the Statute of Labourers was the only reference to social questions, 
and was merely intended to attract the mob. The moving spirit, Jack 
Cade, whatever his real name may have been, was undoubtedly an adven- 
turer possessed of considerable education and some military experience. 
But the insurrection was one of the common folk, and therein lay its 
one difference at the outset from the risings of the baronage in arms 
which were the traditional method of dealing with constitutional crises. 
When the king's forces were called out to disperse the insurgents, they were 
promptly disbanded again for fear of mutiny. But in other respects the 
precedents of„Tyler's Rebellion were followed. Jack Cade kept his men 
in hand until they got into London. Then there came a riot which turned 
the friends of order into the enemies of insurrection ; Jack Cade disbanded 
his forces on promise of pardon, and the pardon was then repudiated. 
Cade fled, but was caught and killed. 

The victory of the government brought over Richard of York from 
Ireland, whither he had been sent as lieutenant, for some time past, to 
keep him out of the way. Jack Cade had made use of his name, a fact 
which aroused some suspicions that he himself had set the insurrection 
on foot to test public opinion. He was now determined both to dis- 
sociate himself from the rebellion, and as next prince of the blood to 
take the lead in demanding the removal of " the king's evil counsellors." 
His arrival on the scene meant that the rival parties must now measure 
their strength together ; on the one side Somerset and the queen, carrying 
with them the king, and on the other side the heir-presumptive and all 
who were hostile to a government which had proved itself hopelessly 
incompetent. 



206 



NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 



IV 



THE RED AND WHITE ROSES 



Before York arrived, Somerset was back from Normandy, discredited 
and unpopular, but still in the confidence of the king and queen. The 
meeting of a full parliament showed that the Commons were entirely on the 

side of York ; but it would have 
been difficult to say whether among 
the peers the greater strength was on 
the side of York or of Somerset. At 
this time there was no question of 
disputing the succession ; York him- 
self did not assert his own title as 
against that of Henry VI. until ten 
years afterwards. He was satisfied 
with his position as heir-presumptive, 
which could only be challenged if 
Somerset ventured to claim that the 
legitimation of the Beauforts gave 
him a prior right as being descended 
in the direct male line from John 
of Gaunt. York and his supporters 
demanded only that the heir -pre- 
sumptive should be properly re- 
cognised in the Royal Council. 

The great strength of York, apart 
from the extent of his own dukedom 
and earldoms, lay in the support of 
the great Neville family, of whom 
the most powerful were the Earl of 
Salisbury and his son Richard of 
Warwick, at this time a young man of 
two and twenty. But the Neville con- 
nection of itself included nearly one-fourth of the lay members of the House 
of Peers, who at this time scarcely numbered more than fifty all told. York's 
own wife was Salisbury's sister. The baronage during the past hundred 
and fifty years had acquired a new character, partly perhaps because, with 
the systematisation of parliament, the barons with a hereditary right to be 
summoned individually had become a definite group, who had been per- 
mitted to accumulate earldoms and baronies in a few hands. Moreover, 
there had been another change in practice which counteracted the anti-feudal 
legislation of Edward I. It had become the practice of many of the gentry, 




Tattershall, a 1 5 th century castle. 
[Built between 1433-1455.] 



LANCASTER AND YORK 207 

men of small estate but of gentle blood, to pledge themselves personally to 
the service of great nobles : a process distinct from the old feudal com- 
mendation as practised in England, and in effect assimilating the English 
system to the feudalism of the Continent. 

It was the intention then of York and his supporters to maintain a 
strictly constitutional attitude, not to stir up civil war ; and with the parties 
thus balanced, Somerset, retaining his personal influence with the king, still 
retained the ascendency. York was at last irritated to the point of appear- 
ing in arms to demand the dismissal of Somerset ; but he disbanded his 
forces on receiving what he took to be satisfactory assurances, only to find 
that he had thus placed himself in the power of his enemies. A sort of 
reconciliation was however effected, because the French were now over- 
running Guienne, a province which still itself preferred the English to the 
French allegiance. It was felt that a united effort must be made to save 
it. At the end of 145 2 an expedition was despatched under the veteran 
warrior, Talbot, Ear! of Shrewsbury. But in the next summer Talbot's force 
was annihilated and he himself was slain in a desperate attempt to force an 
impregnable position at Castillon. The disaster was irretrievable, and 
although several towns and fortresses held out stubbornly for some months, 
all Guienne was lost before the end of the year. The Calais Pale alone 
remained to England. The Hundred Years' War was at an end. 

At this moment Henry VI. sank from his normal condition of feeble 
incapacity into one of unqualified imbecility ; and immediately afterwards 
the question o.f the succession was complicated by the birth of a son who 
now stood between York and the throne. The practical effect was that 
York's followers were strong enough to secure his appointment as Protector 
of the realm, the confinement of Somerset in the Tower, and the appoint- 
ment of sundry Yorkists to high offices of state. York used his power with 
moderation, and made no attempt to take vengeance on his enemies. 

But at the end of 1454 Henry recovered. York surrendered the 
Protectorship, and Henry at once made haste to reinstate Somerset and 
his party. The proceedings of Somerset and the queen made it evident 
that they had no intention of following York's example of moderation, and 
were preparing to carry out a vindictive policy. York and Salisbury, who 
had retired to the north, took up arms and marched towards London, 
declaring their loyalty to the Crown but demanding the arrest and trial of 
Somerset ; and the first engagement of the War of the Roses took place at 
St. Albans, where Somerset was slain, and the king himself fell into the 
hands of the Yorkists. It is to be noted, however, that those killed in the 
battle numbered only five or six score. 

Again York used his victory with moderation. A parliament was 
summoned which was certainly Yorkist, but was not like later parliaments 
composed exclusively of the adherents of the party which had for the 
moment prevailed. Another of the king's lapses into imbecility again made 
York Protector, but only for a few months ; and presently the queen felt 



2 o8 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

strong enough to induce Henry once more to dismiss the Yorkist ministry. 
Still there was a formal public reconciliation and a hollow truce between 
the parties for the next three years. Each side was anxious to force the 
blame of actual aggression on the other. 

In 1459* however, Margaret was so palpably preparing for a coup de main, 
that the Yorkists took up arms, and hostilities were renewed. But although 
Salisbury won a small victory at Blore Heath, Margaret had succeeded 
in making it appear that York was the aggressor, whereby much of the 

support on which he had counted 
failed him. When the Royalists 
advanced against him on an autumn 
campaign, the Yorkist army melted 
to pieces and the leaders had to 
take flight; York himself to Ireland, 
where he had made himself ex- 
tremely popular during his lieu- 
tenancy, and his eldest son Edward, 
the young Earl of March, with 
Salisbury and Warwick, to Calais, 
of which" Warwick was captain. 
In that capacity the future "king- 
maker" had latterly achieved a 
high reputation by his successful 
operations in the defence of the 
Channel. 

A parliament was called, of 
what was now to become the usual 
character. It was simply an as- 
sembly of the Royalist nominees ; 
and it opened that sweeping campaign of attainders with which both parties 
henceforth supplemented their military operations. Instead of bringing 
persons accused of treason to trial, an Act of parliament was passed by the 
same process as any other Act of parliament, declaring that a long list of 
persons were guilty of treason, though the king reserved the right of pardon 
or mitigation of sentence; a right which on this occasion was freely exer- 
cised by the pacific Henry. 

But before twelve months had passed, Warwick, who had been concert- 
ing his plans with Richard in Ireland, landed suddenly on the coast of Kent, 
where the Yorkist cause was strongly supported. The Royalists had been 
lulled into a false security ; the Yorkists gathered in force, and London 
admitted him. Thence he marched to Northampton, where the Royalists 
were hastily gathering, and put them completely to rout, capturing the 
person of the unlucky king. At this battle the regular Yorkists' rule was 
adopted of sparing the commonalty, but giving no quarter to nobles or 
knights. The battle made Warwick master of the south of England. The 




The youthful Henry VI. 
[From Lydgate's " Life of St. Edmund."] 



LANCASTER AND YORK 209 

north unwisely was left alone. Richard of York returned from Ireland, 
came to London where parliament was summoned, and startled and 
alarmed his supporters by at once asserting his own immediate claim to the 
throne as the legitimate successor of Richard II. Warwick and the bulk 
of Richard's supporters were, however, strongly opposed to this reversal of 
York's policy. Richard was forced to accept the proposal, to which the 
captive king gave his consent, that Henry should retain the crown for the 
rest of his life, but should be succeeded by York, not by the Prince of 
Wales. The arrangement was ratified by parliament. 

Margaret, however, was by no means prepared to accept the exclusion 
of her son from the succession. She was still at large in Wales, and forth- 
with set about mustering the Lancastrians, as we may now call them, in the 
north. York at once despatched his son Edward, a lad of eighteen, who 
had distinguished himself at the battle of Northampton, to the Welsh 
Marches to keep Wales in check ; and leaving Warwick in the south, 
hurried north himself along with Salisbury. But on the 30th December his 
small force was overwhelmed at the battle of Wakefield. The Lancastrians 
gave no quarter. Richard himself, his second son Rutland, and Salisbury, 
were taken and put to death ; several of his principal adherents were slain 
on the field. The war had degenerated into a vindictive slaughter of rival 
partisans. 

The victors marching southwards encountered and defeated Warwick 
in the second battle of St. Albans, some seven weeks after Wakefield, 
recovered the person of the captive Henry, and advanced to bargain with 
the Londoners for admission to the capital. But in the meantime the Earl 
of March had routed a Royalist force at Mortimer's Cross, and was hurrying 
to join Warwick. The Yorkist leaders now also hastened to London, but, 
unlike the Lancastrians, were immediately admitted. The slaughter at 
Wakefield had removed Warwick's scruples, and? with the acclamations of 
the Londoners and the troops, Edward IV. was proclaimed king on the 
ground that the parliament of 1399 had had no power to transfer the 
succession from the legitimate line of the Mortimers. 

The foiled Lancastrians retreated to the north ; Edward and Warwick 
were soon in pursuit. A great battle, fought at Towton, was decisive. 
After a desperate struggle the Lancastrians were utterly routed with 
tremendous slaughter, and Wakefield was avenged by the death of all 
prisoners of any position who were taken. King Henry, who had been 
delivered from the custody of Warwick at the battle of St. Albans, escaped 
to Scotland with his queen. 

Warwick was left to keep the north quiet while Edward returned to 
London, and was crowned in state. In November the king called his first 
parliament, of course a purely Yorkist assembly. It passed an Act of 
Attainder in which there were more than a hundred and thirty names of the 
living and the dead ; the point of these sweeping measures was obviously 
the confiscation of the estates of the attainted, and their distribution among 

O 



2io NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

the adherents of the victorious side. Incidentally, the parliament pro- 
nounced that the three Henrys had been usurpers, though the benignant 
Edward was pleased to confirm the charters which the usurpers had 
granted, and the honours and privileges bestowed by them, except in the 
case of persons now attainted. The young king f:en gave himself up to 
public displays and private dissipations ; content apparently to leave 
politics and government to the cousin who had made him king. Next year, 

however, the energetic 
Margaret of Anjou was 
again at work, and kept 
Warwick busy until 
the summer of 1463, 
when her followers 
were dispersed, and 
she herself only 
escaped capture by 
throwing herself, 
according to a tradi- 
tion of good authority, 
upon the generosity of 
a robber whom she 
met in her flight, who 
conveyed her into 
safety. A final desper- 
ate effort of the Lan- 
castrians was crushed 
in the following year by Warwick's brother, Montague, at Hedgely Moor 
and Hexham. 

But a rupture was approaching between the king and his too powerful 
cousin, to explain which we must briefly refer to French affairs since 
the expulsion of the English. Louis XI. was now on the French throne, 
and was engaged in consolidating the supremacy of the Crown over the 
feudal nobility, mainly by the methods of intrigue. Philip, Duke of 
Burgundy, however, having by marriage acquired great possessions in 
the Low Countries, had virtually made himself an independent monarch, 
being in effect lord of the Netherlands as well as of the duchy of Burgundy 
in France, and of the county of Burgundy or Franche Comte, which fell 
within the German Empire. Hence though Burgundy was the name 
generally given inclusively to the whole dominion, Burgundy itself was 
the less important part of it, the more important, at least from the English 
point of view, being the Netherlands. Neither Louis nor Philip was will- 
ing to see the strength of the other increased. 

Louis, somewhat hastily, had committed himself to the support of 
Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian faction ; Philip was naturally 
inclined in consequence to favour the Yorkists. Warwick was unwilling 




The Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Warwick in battle. 



LANCASTER AND YORK 211 

to break with Burgundy, but was still more anxious to bring Louis over 
to the Yorkist side. Louis, realising that, in the language of a modern 
statesman, he had been " backing the wrong horse," was willing enough 
to buy the friendship of the de facto king of England. Warwick proposed 
to marry King Edward to the French queen's sister, since Louis had 
neither a sister nor a daughter of his own to offer. To the Earl's intense 
disgust Edward ruined the whole negotiation by announcing that he had 
already married Lady Elizabeth Grey, widow of the Lancastrian John 
Grey, Lord Ferrars, and 
daughter of the Lan- 
castrian Richard Wood- 
ville, Lord Rivers. 

Warwick was angry 
enough at the trick that 
had been played upon 
him, since it showed 
how slight was his real 
ascendency over the 
king. Still, there was 
no immediate breach. 
But Edward proceeded 
to marry his wife's kins- 
folk right and left to 
heirs and heiresses, thus 
forming a new family 
group wherewith to 
counterbalance the 
Neville connection; 
and Warwick's sus- 
picion and distrust deepened though Edward still treated him as his 
first counsellor and minister. In spite of the marriage fiasco, he was 
sent on a diplomatic mission to France and Burgundy. The relations 
between Louis and Charles the Rash, the heir of Burgundy, were 
exceedingly strained, and Louis proved as anxious to conciliate Warwick 
as Charles was careless. The seeds were stown of an alliance between 
the French king and the earl. Meanwhile, by a stroke of good fortune, 
the unfortunate Henry VI. had been caught wandering about aimlessly 
in the north, and was lodged in the Tower. The relations between 
Warwick and Edward were further strained when the latter refused to 
sanction the marriage of his next brother George, Duke of Clarence, with 
Warwick's daughter. And now Charles the Bold entered upon a negotia- 
tion behind Warwick's back for his own marriage with the English king's 
sister Margaret. Warwick was again sent off ostensibly to negotiate a 
treaty with Louis, and returned accompanied by a French embassy to 
discover that the marriage treaty with Charles was already settled. 




A bedroom and its appointments in the middle of the 15th century. 



212 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

Edward remained indolently blind to the danger that was brewing. 
Warwick in alliance with Clarence was preparing to play the old part 
of the Lords Ordainers and the Lords Appellants. When nearly two 
years had passed, half the north suddenly rose under a leader who called 
himself (l Robin of Redesdale," with the usual complaint against " the 
king's evil counsellors," and the usual demand for their removal. Edward 
hurried to the north ; Warwick at Calais promptly married his daughter 
to Clarence, crossed to England, raised the south, and marched upon 
London. Three weeks after Clarence's marriage Edward was a prisoner. 
To all appearance Warwick's victory was complete, and he was not 
afraid to release the king after executing Rivers and one or two others 
of the Woodville group. But a futile Lancastrian rising in Lincolnshire 
gave Edward his opportunity. He collected a considerable force to sup- 
press the rising, and having demolished the rebels at the battle called 
Lose-Coat Field, he announced that Warwick and Clarence were implicated 
in the treason. Since he already had an army in the field, the earl and 
the duke could only take a hasty flight to France. 

Then the craft of Louis XI. came into play and brought about nothing 
less amazing than a reconciliation between Warwick and Margaret of Anjou, 
to be confirmed by the marriage of Warwick's younger daughter Anne to 
Margaret's son Edward, the titular Prince of Wales. Clarence was appar- 
ently satisfied by being recognised as the next prince of the blood. Edward 
had underrated the strength of the Nevilles. Warwick repeated his previous 
device ; Edward was enticed to the north to suppress an insurrection 
organised there, while the earl himself again landed unopposed in the south 
and proclaimed Henry VI. Half Edward's troops belonged to the faction 
not of York but of Neville, and deserted him. Edward in turn was obliged 
to fly from the country in hot haste to take refuge with Charles of Burgundy. 
Again Warwick's victory seemed complete, and Henry was brought out from 
the Tower to be posed once more as king. 

But Clarence — ''false fleeting perjured Clarence" — was already in 
communication with the exile. In the spring Edward made a sudden dash 
from Flanders, and landed in Yorkshire, where he began by announcing that 
he had returned to claim not the Crown but the Duchy of York. The York- 
ists of the north hastened to his standard. By consummate generalship he 
prevented the Lancastrian levies from effecting a junction, was joined by 
Clarence, and, having completely misled Warwi?k as to his designs, suddenly 
directed his march from the west upon London with the earl in hot pursuit. 
He reached his goal first, was admitted into the city, shut Henry up again 
in the Tower, and marched out to fight the earl. 

The hostile forces met in a thick fog at Barnet. In the mist Warwick's 
left and centre attacked each other, each at first thinking that the other was 
the enemy, and then that they were traitors. The blunder decided the day, 
which otherwise seems to have been going in favour of the Lancastrians. 
Warwick was slain on the field, and his forces were completely put to rout. 



LANCASTER AND YORK 213 

On the same day Margaret landed in the west. There she rallied her adher- 
ents, and was on the march to join another band of her partisans on the 
Welsh border, when Edward by desperate marching succeeded in intercept- 
ing her and forcing a battle at Tewkesbury. There he won the decisive 
victory which made him indisputably King of England. Margaret herself was 
taken ; the young Prince of Wales was killed, probably in the battle, not, 
as a later tradition asserted, in cold blood by Edward's youngest brother 
Richard, Duke of Gloucester. No one of the line of Henry VI. except 
Henry VI. himself remained alive ; and of the Beaufort blood only the 
young son of Margaret Tudor, Henry, Earl of Richmond, and the young 
Duke of Buckingham, the son of the other Margaret Beaufort. It was the 
least of Henry VI.'s misfortunes that he died in the Tower a few days after 
Tewkesbury, almost certainly by the hand of the Duke of Gloucester, though 
of course it was announced that his death was a natural one. 



V 

EDWARD IV 

After the victory of Tewkesbury, Edward reigned unchallenged for some 
twelve years. In the hour of his triumph he was only in his thirtieth year. 
He had proved that when he chose to exert himself he was not only a first- 
rate fighting, man, but a consummate general, and — always with the same 
proviso — a master of diplonuitic craft and persuasiveness. Incidentally also, 
he was completely and perfectly unscrupulous. Nevertheless he was funda- 
mentally indolent, a lover of pleasure, unambitious. Since he had chosen 
to play for a crown, he made a point of winning it ; having won it, he 
intended only to enjoy it at his ease. He did not play the tyrant in general, 
because doing so would not have conduced to his comfort ; but if his 
comfort demanded an act of tyranny, however monstrous, he committed 
it without a qualm. He reigned as an absolute monarch without protest 
on the part of people or barons ; because he did not attempt to tax the 
people, while only a remnant of the old baronage existed, and the new men 
were his own creatures. Edward's demands for money were so rare that 
we are at first inclined to wonder how it was that he alone managed to do 
what the grumblers always declared the king ought to do, and " live of his 
own." But in the first place his treasury was conveniently filled by the 
enormous confiscations, the spoils of the final victory over the Lancastrians, 
and in the second place he made up for any casual deficiencies by the 
ingenious device of Benevolences. That is, he asked not for loans, but for 
presents ; and the individal who refused his request learnt that if his good- 
will to the king was so small his loyalty to the throne fell under suspicion. 
It was cheaper to pay with a good grace than to resist ; and at the same 
time it was not easy to build up a constitutional opposition on the basis 



214 



NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 



of Benevolences, since technically no compulsion was brought to bear. 
From these sources then Edward obtained sufficient supplies for a personal 
expenditure which was lavish but not particularly extravagant — he had the 
business instinct — while his public expenditure was even parsimonious. 
Moreover he was released from the eternal drain of the French wars as 
well as from the spasmodic expenditure on the defence of his throne against 
a rival dynasty. 

Thus it was but rarely that Edward found it necessary to summon a 
parliament ; and parliaments, when he did summon them, were de- 
generate. In the chaos 



of recent years free 
elections had dropped 
out of fashion. Borough 
elections had fallen into 
the hands of the cor- 
porations, and the cor- 
porations themselves 
tended to become close 
bodies. The franchise 
of the shire courts, 
which elected the 
knights of the shire, 
had become restricted 
practically to free- 
holders ; and in point 
of fact election was fre- 
quently superseded by 
the mere nomination of 
the sheriffs, or else was 




Edward IV., his son, Edward V., and the court. 



effectively controlled by local magnates, so that the House of Commons 
was now very largely a packed assembly. On the other hand, of the old 
baronial families, the alternate victories of Lancaster and York had left 
few surviving members in either faction, and their places were to a 
great extent taken by a mushroom peerage of Edward's own creation. If 
Edward had chosen to emphasise his position as an absolute monarch, 
it is likely enough that he would have been able to convert the English 
monarchy into an almost unqualified despotism. He did not do so, 
because he had no ambitions which made it worth while to risk trying 
to do so. The twelve years of Edward IV.'s reign as an absolute monarch 
are distinguished chiefly by an event which was not political at all, the 
setting up of Caxton's printing press under the royal patronage. For 
Edward was a patron of art and literature ; intellectually the most cultured 
monarch who had occupied the English throne, at least for many centuries. 
Two other events, however, have to be recorded. The ambitions and 
the arrogance of George, Duke of Clarence, excited Edward's wrath. The 



LANCASTER AND YORK 215 

duke was arraigned before parliament by the king in person, was con- 
demned, and died in prison when his execution was imminent. There was 
no adequate reason for murdering him in the circumstances, and the later 
tradition that he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine was probably 
a pure fiction. Premature deaths were always attributed to violence. 
Clarence left a son and daughter, Edward, Earl of Warwick, and Margaret, 
Countess of Salisbury — they were the grandchildren of Warwick the king- 
maker — both of whom ultimately perished by the axe of the executioner. 

The other event was Edward's French expedition of 1475. Edward 
proposed to make war upon Louis in conjunction with Charles of Burgundy, 
a prince as erratic as he was ambitious. It was a long time before the 
English people ceased to hanker for a revival of the glories of Henry V. ; 
and for that purpose parliament did not grudge the king ample financial 
support. Burgundy — in either sense — was by tradition and by interest a 
desirable ally. Edward was no mean strategist and had never been 
defeated in a stricken field. He certainly could not have conquered 
France, but if he had meant war in earnest he would probably have conducted 
some brilliant campaigns. But he did not mean war in earnest. He got 
his money, and carried his army to Calais ; but there was no fighting. 
Louis was prepared to buy him off, and he himself wanted nothing better 
than to be bought off. Edward cheerfully deserted his ally Burgundy with 
the excuse that Charles had disabled himself for co-operating in an effective 
campaign. Fifteen thousand pounds down and a pension of ten thousand a 
year which Edward described as a " tribute," was the price paid to him at 
the treaty of Pecquigny ; a very substantial addition to his income, which 
was duly paid. 

In the spring of 1483 Edward was seized with a mortal illness, which 
carried him off in a few days. The chroniclers are unanimous in attributing 
his premature death when he was only forty to a constitution ruined by 
luxury and dissipation. He left behind him two young sons, Edward V. and 
Richard, Duke of York, and several daughters. Of his brothers the only 
survivor was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had been unfailingly loyal to 
him, and had won a high reputation both as a soldier and as an adminis- 
trator. 

VI 

RICHARD III 

The need for a regency was obvious. The young king was at Ludlow 
in the hands of the queen-mother's brother and son, Rivers and Grey ; the 
young Duke of York was with the queen herself in London, so that the 
advantages lay with the queen's family for securing the regency to her. 
But they were unpopular, and Gloucester, who was in the north, knew 
that he could count upon strong support in securing the regency for him- 



216 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

self. In company with the Duke of Buckingham he overtook Edward and 
his escort on their way to London, and forthwith arrested Rivers and Grey. 
The queen-mother took sanctuary at Westminster along with the rest of 
her children, and the council immediately acknowledged Gloucester as 
Protector. 

But the sudden death of his brother had suggested to Richard ambitions 
which went far beyond a mere protectorate. His scheme was to declare 
the children of Edward IV. illegitimate, and to claim the crown for himself. 
He privately secured the support of some of the great lords who were 
purchasable, and six weeks after receiving the protectorate he arrested at 
the Council Board Lord Hastings, a trusted friend of the late king, Bishop 
Morton, and others from whom he expected opposition. Hastings was 
beheaded there and then without trial. Then he cajoled or frightened the 
queen into handing over to him the young Duke of York, who was placed 
in the Tower along with his brother the king ; not of course, nominally, as 
a prisoner. Next his design was revealed when a certain Dr. Shaw 
preached a sermon at Paul's Cross, in which he affirmed that the late 
king's marriage with Elizabeth Woodville had been null and void because 
he was precontracted to another lady. The congregation received the 
sermon in amazed silence, but London was practically overawed by the 
presence of a large number of Gloucester's and Buckingham's retainers ; 
and an assembly which passed for a parliament was induced to petition 
Gloucester to take upon himself the royal office as the legitimate head of 
the House of York, in priority to the late king's "bastard" children, and to 
those of Clarence who were debarred by their father's attainder. After a 
show of reluctance Gloucester assented, and a few days later was crowned 
king. The prisoners Rivers and Grey had already been executed. Nearly 
all the magnates of the realm formally assented by bekig present at the 
coronation. Nowhere was there any sign of resistance to the coup d'etat. 

Richard started on a progress through the Midlands. During his 
absence the two young princes were murdered in the Tower ; that is, they 
disappeared, though their bones were not discovered till nearly two hundred 
years afterwards. That the boys were murdered no one at the time seems 
to have doubted at all, though the mystery attending their death was made 
use of for political purposes in the next reign. 

But the supporters of Richard in his usurpation had not anticipated 
that it would be sealed by a crime at which all men shuddered. For the 
most part they were terrorised into silence ; one at least was frightened 
into conspiracy. Buckingham, the representative of the line of the 
youngest son of King Edward III., while his mother was a Beaufort, 
entered upon a plot which aimed at uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian 
interests by the marriage of the young Earl of Richmond, the head of the 
Beaufort connection, with Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Edward IV. 
But Buckingham's insurrection in the autumn was abortive. Premature 
risings broke it up, and Buckingham himself was caught and beheaded. 



LANCASTER AND YORK 217 

Richmond, who had found safety in Brittany since his early boyhood, 
should have joined the insurrection, and the delay caused by communicating 
with him was partly responsible for the false start which ensured failure. 
It was not his fault that when he attempted to cross the Channel he was 
beaten off by tempests, so that when he managed to reach England it was 
only to find that he was too late and must hasten back to Brittany. The 
elements indeed fought against Buckingham ; had the cause of Richard 
been a righteous one, the Duke's overthrow would probably have been 
attributed to Divine intervention, for his movements had been completely 
paralysed by terrific rains and floods. 

Richard possessed the ability which, under happier circumstances, might 
have made him a powerful king, held in honour if not in affection by posterity ; 
for like his brilliant brother he had great military and diplomatic ability, 
and unlike him was an untiring worker, and his administrative skill was 
well tested. But Edward's numerous progeny barred him from all chance 
of becoming king except by sheer usurpation ; the chance of usurpation 
presented itself only because the king died suddenly before any of his 
offspring were of age. Ten years later, Gloucester would have had no 
chance at all. The temptation to seize the crown presented itself; he 
yielded to it. The violence of the methods by which he had paralysed 
opposition, and the weakness of the plea by which he had procured the 
setting aside of his nephew, drove him to the murder of the young princes 
as the only means of securing the crown of which he had robbed them. 
He had committed himself hopelessly to the career of the typical tyrant, upon 
whom ruthless violence is forced as the only alternative to that ruin which 
the violence itself not seldom precipitates. The murder of the princes 
drove Buckingham to revolt ; the revolt of Buckingham carried home 
to Richard that there was not one of his supporters upon whose fidelity he 
could now count ; while among those supporters no man knew when the 
king's distrust might display itself — whether the caress was merely the pre- 
lude to a dagger thrust. 

Yet after Buckingham's fall there was a pause. Richard hoped to 
strengthen himself by combining severity with conciliation. In January he 
called the only full parliament of his reign. As a matter of course it passed 
a sweeping Bill of Attainder, not so much in order to penalise enemies as 
to provide out of the • confiscated estates means for purchasing support. 
The Commons were conciliated by the king's abstention from calling for 
taxation, by a statutory declaration that benevolences were illegal, and by a 
measure directed against the corruption and intimidation of juries. The 
parliament further confirmed the succession of Richard's son, Edward, who 
had already been made Prince of Wales. 

Then this Prince Edward died. There was no prospect of another child 
being born to the king, who was forced to recognise as his heir-presumptive 
John de la Pole, whom we shall presently meet as the Earl of Lincoln. If 
the claim of Clarence's children had been recognised, it would have taken 



2i 8 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

precedence of Richard's own ; they were set aside, on the plea of Clarence's 
attainder. John was the son of the eldest sister of Edward IV. and 
Richard III., who had been married to the Duke of Suffolk. 

Richard strove successfully to secure his own recognition from most of 
the continental potentates ; but France gave shelter to Richmond and to 
the fugitives from England who were gathering to his support. Henry 
Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was recognised as their head by the Lancastrians, 
as being the male representative of the house of Beaufort, through his 
mother, Margaret Beaufort, who had married Edmund Tudor. Edmund's 
father, Owen Tudor, was a Welsh knight who had married Catherine of 
France, the widow of Henry V. This had brought the Tudors into some 
prominence, but did not, of course, affect the succession to the Crown. 

Whatever Richard may have gained through his parliament in the way 
of popular favour was lost in the following year, when he again resorted to 
illegal and arbitrary methods of obtaining money. Public opinion, too, was 
further shocked by the rumour that Richard was contemplating a marriage 
with his own niece, Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV. There is some 
warrant for the belief, in the fact that Richard had abstained, and continued 
to abstain, from the obvious course of marrying the girl to some nonentity ; 
and when Richard's queen died, it was commonly supposed that he had 
made away with her in order to facilitate the scandalous design. Richard 
found himself obliged to declare publicly his innocence of the purpose attri- 
buted to him. 

Through the summer, Henry was preparing for an invasion. In August 
he succeeded in landing at Milford Haven, being secure of Welsh support 
in virtue of his own Welsh descent. Richard gathered an army, but many 
of the lords held aloof altogether, and many of those who assembled with 
professions of loyalty to him were suspected, with good reason, of treacher- 
ous intent. The armies met at Bosworth Field. Lord Stanley was approach- 
ing, professedly to support Richard, but actually pledged to Henry. Richard's 
left wing, led by Northumberland, refused to join battle. Richard, in the 
centre, made a furious attack — so furious that for a moment there seemed a 
chance of victory. But only for a moment. Stanley's forces fell upon his 
flank. The battle was lost, but Richard refused to fly, and fell upon the 
field, fighting desperately. The crown he had been wearing on his helmet 
was picked up and set on Richmond's head by Lord Stanley ; and on the 
field of battle the victor was hailed as King Henry VII. 



VII 

THE PROGRESS OF ENGLAND 

The constitutional history of the century preceding the battle of Bosworth 
shows us first an attempt to limit the powers of the crown, taking as pre- 



LANCASTER AND YORK 219 

cedents the Provisions of Oxford and the Lords Ordainers ; then Richard II.'s 
attempt to free the crown from all restraints and render it despotic ; then the 
premature subjection of the Crown to the Commons, whose new authority 
collapsed in the face of civil war. The civil war not only paralysed the 
Commons, but also shattered the baronage, thereby making it possible for a 
dynasty of able rulers to recover for the Crown a degree of practical 
autocracy. But it did not destroy the tradition of parliamentary control. 

Neither foreign wars nor civil broils arrested the normal course of 
economic development. The foreign wars were fought on foreign soil ; the 
conquest of France and the expulsion from France both involved devastation 
of France, but not of England. The insurrections under Richard II. and 
Henry IV. and the War of the Roses were largely in the nature of faction 
fights ; and though much blood was shed, they were not, comparatively 
speaking, destructive of property. It is not, indeed, to be supposed that 
agricultural life or town life and commerce were unaffected ; but only in 
rare instances was there sacking of towns, and confiscations were directed 
not against wealthy burgesses but against the owners of wide lands. Hence 
England, on the whole, was rather prosperous than otherwise ; although we 
must decline to accept the view of those historians who have persuaded 
themselves that the fifteenth century was the golden age of the agriculturist 
and the craftsman. 

The return to normal conditions, after the Peasant Revolt, ended the 
reaction which had checked the passage from tenure by service to paid 
service and tenure by rent. The villein, as a rule, became either a " copy- 
holder " with a right to his tenement in perpetuity, subject to the payment 
of a rent which could not be raised, or a free labourer ; not because those 
rights were extorted from reluctant landowners, but because the landowners 
found the arrangement profitable. The idea of servitude passed away, 
and nothing was heard about " bondage" in Jack Cade's insurrection. The 
copyholder ceased to sympathise with the labourer, when he was himself 
freed from the fear of enforced services and possibly wished to hire labour. 
The labourer, on the other hand, could command adequate wages, because 
as yet the supply of labour did not exceed the demand except in the 
off seasons. But it cannot be assumed that employment was regular 
throughout the year, or that the recorded rates of wages represent the 
average wage received throughout the year by the individual labourer. 

There was another outcome of the depopulation and disorganisation 
consequent upon the Black Death. A great deal of the land was thrown 
out of cultivation altogether, and much of it was not brought back into 
cultivation because at the first it was not necessary to grow so much food 
as before, apart from the fact that there was not sufficient labour available. 
Whole families of the villeins, nay, in some cases entire villages, had been 
swept away by the pestilence ; and many villein holdings, reverting to the 
lords of the manor, were absorbed into demesne lands. The lords then, as 
a mere matter of convenience, turned over what had formally been tilled 



220 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

land to pasture, growing sheep on it instead of attempting to restore it as 
arable. Nobody was the worse, and the sheep did not demand the same 
amount of labour as tillage ; which, in view of the shortage of labour, was 
advantageous. On the other hand, with the ever-increasing demand for 
wool, the landlords began to wake up to the fact that wool-growing was a 
profitable occupation, more profitable than corn-growing when low prices 
ruled. Out of these things trouble arose presently, but it was not actively 

felt until some while after Henry VII. was seated on 
the throne. 

The policy of Edward III. gave an impetus to 
commercial life which was actively felt in the towns, 
and developed the mercantile class and commercial 
enterprise. With the growth of the cloth-working 
industry, the " staples " in which the merchants of 
the staple dealt ceased to be the only goods for 
which the English merchant sought to find a market 
abroad. But the individual merchant found in- 
numerable barriers to interfere with his trade in 
foreign cities. The German towns of the Hanseatic 
League had been admitted to trade privileges in 
England on the hypothesis that they would grant 
corresponding privileges to English traders ; but the 
individual trader was not strong enough to get his 
rights recognised. Hence the great mercantile com- 
pany of the Merchant Adventurers received a charter 
in the reign of Henry IV. granting it a monopoly of 
foreign trade in other than staple goods, since a 
company could fight its own battles very much 
better than isolated traders. There was a jealousy, 
indeed, between the Merchant Adventurers and the 
Merchants of the Staple? because the main trade of 
the former was in cloth, the manufactured article, 
and of the latter in wool, the raw material ; and 
the cloth workers sought to check the export of wool in order to cheapen 
it at home, so that the interests of the two associations conflicted. The 
fifteenth century, however, saw the Merchant Adventurers steadily and 
successfully forcing their way into foreign markets. 

With the expansion of trade and the increase of manufactures, even in 
a very limited field, capitalism came into being. That is to say, men found 
that when they accumulated wealth they could carry on operations on a 
larger scale ; and also that the surplus wealth not required for extending 
their own operations could be profitably applied by others. In the chartered 
towns, every one was under the strict supervision and regulations of the 
craft gilds, but beyond the jurisdiction of the borough men could 
follow their own devices. Thus it was to a great extent in new unchartered 




An alderman of London, 1474- 
[From a brass.] 



LANCASTER AND YORK 221 

towns that the cloth-working industry grew up and flourished; and to this, 
in part at least, may be attributed that decay of some of the older 
boroughs from which a falling off in the general prosperity has sometimes 
been inferred. Trade was drawn away from them to the new centres. 

The fact that there was a great deal of private wealth is demonstrated by 
the great expenditure in this century upon building — a form of outlay in 
which none but rich men could indulge. But it would seem rather that a few 
men were acquiring great wealth than that the normal standard was greatly 
raised as a result of the new methods. 
The craftsman was tending to become 
the client of the big trader rather 
than an independent trader on his 
own account. The journeyman's 
chance of setting up for himself dimin- 
ished, as it became necessary to start 
business with a substantial stock-in- 
trade. The old days had departed 
when the craftsman had required 
little more than the tools with which 
he executed the orders that came to 
him, working upon materials which 
were provided for him. The man 
who wanted custom must have wares 
to exhibit instead of merely waiting for orders, and wares to exhibit meant 
capital locked 5 up. So the average journeyman no longer regarded himself 
as being on the way to become a master craftsman, but expected to remain 
a journeyman all his days. Thus the fifteenth century saw the beginnings 
of the opposition between capital and labour, between employers and 
employed. 

With regard to foreign commerce, it must be remarked that England had 
scarcely as yet developed a carrying trade. In this department she could 
not compete with the cities of Italy and the Low Countries. It was to 
encourage English shipping more from a military than from a com- 
mercial point of view that the first Navigation Act was passed in the reign 
of Richard II., requiring that goods should be brought for import either 
in English bottoms or in the ships of the exporting country. The regula- 
tion was, in fact, so impracticable that it very soon became a dead letter. 
English sailors generally held their own in the narrow seas ; but the great 
development of English shipping for all purposes was the work of the 
Tudor period. 




A merchant. 
[From Caxton's "Book of Chess," 1475.] 



222 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

VIII 

SCOTLAND 

Scottish history, while the houses of Lancaster and York were occupy- 
ing the throne of England, is a somewhat dreary record. When Robert III. 
died, in 1406, his successor on the throne, James I., was a boy of eleven, 
and was, moreover, a captive in the hands of the English king. From 
that time until more than two hundred years afterwards, when Charles I. 
succeeded to the crown of Scotland and of England, every Scottish sove- 
reign was a child when he or she succeeded to the crown, and only one 
was over twelve years of age. Of the whole series, not one attained to 
the age of five-and-forty except the last, James VI. of Scotland and I. of 
England. During the eighty years now under review there were three 
kings of Scotland. James I. spent the first eighteen years of his nominal 
reign in captivity ; thirteen years after his return to Scotland he was 
murdered. James II. was then six years old; he was killed by the bursting 
of a cannon before he was thirty. James III. was eight years old, and 
was killed in a baronial revolt at the age of thirty-six, three years after 
the accession of the first Tudor. Each of the three reigns involved a long 
regency, and a regency commonly meant a prolonged struggle for ascen- 
dency between baronial factions. Under such conditions no country 
could prosper, and history to a great extent degenerates into a record 
of deeds of violence. 

When King Robert died, his brother, Robert, Duke of Albany — it will 
be remembered that the king's real name was John — became regent. He 
was already an old man, almost seventy years of age. Although he has 
been much vilified, the fourteen years of his rule as regent seem to 
show him as, on the whole, a praiseworthy administrator. The head and 
front of his offending was his failure to procure the liberation of his nephew 
and king ; and it is not unreasonable to find for this some excuse in 
the fact that he failed also for ten years to procure the release of his 
own son, Murdach, who had been taken prisoner at Homildon Hill. Albany, 
in fact, managed to keep the peace among the barons, refused to tax the 
commons, and accomplished nothing serious to the detriment of England. 
The most notable event of his rule was the great battle of Harlaw, at which 
Donald, Lord of the Isles, met with a great defeat. The Isles, it must be 
remembered, were populated by Celts and Celticised Scandinavians ; they 
had not definitely recognised the sovereignty of the King of Scots until 
the reign of Alexander III., and although the Lord of the Isles in Bruce's day 
had lent King Robert valuable assistance at Bannockburn, his descendants, 
and half Celtic Scotland, scarcely looked upon themselves as subjects 
of the Scots king, and only recognised a hazy sovereignty. If disunited 



LANCASTER AND YORK 223 

amongst themselves by tribal rivalries and divisions, still tradition, customs, 
race, and language set a wider gulf between them collectively and the 
Normanised " Saxons " of the south and east. The occasion of Donald's 
rising was a claim to the earldom of Ross ; but it has been very commonly 
looked upon as a bid for Celtic supremacy. Donald raised a great High- 
land host, and was marching upon Aberdeen when he was met by Alex- 
ander Stewart, Earl of Mar. At the " Red Harlaw " there was a terrific 
slaughter ; both sides claimed the victory ; but the practical effect was 
that Donald retired, and the Highlands and Lowlands were never again 
pitted against each other until the days when the Highlanders were them- 
selves the champions of the house of Stuart. 

At the close of his long life, when Henry V. was bringing all northern 
France beneath his rule, Albany sent succours to the ancient ally of 
Scotland which played a creditable and valorous part in the French struggle. 
It was a Scottish force which inflicted the first great defeat upon the 
English at the battle of Bauge in 1420 ; it was Scottish troops that 
bore the brunt of the fighting when Bedford won his victories at Crevant 
and Verneuil ; there were Scots with Joan of Arc at Pataye ; and a Scot- 
tish historian has remarked, with justifiable pride, that the Scots alone 
were loyal to the Maid of Orleans to the last. 

But all these doings came after the old Duke of Albany was dead. 
From 1420 to 1424 his incompetent son, Murdach, tookhis place as regent. 
Then James I. returned to his country to find it in a ghastly state of misrule 
and disorder, which he attributed, somewhat unjustly, to the iniquities of 
his uncle aVid cousin. His eighteen years in England had taught him a 
good deal ; he resolved at all costs to restore order in his own land ; and 
the first condition of doing so was to establish the royal authority over the 
turbulent nobility. The house of Albany was popular with the commons, 
and the king gained no general favour by striking at it. But the policy 
he adopted was to strike, and strike hard, at the most powerful and the 
most turbulent. Albany himself, and others of his kin with sundry of the 
leading nobles, were brought to the block. The king's arbitrary rule 
stirred up fierce personal animosities against him ; but his hand was strong, 
and his aims were just, whatever may be thought of his methods. He was 
a vigorous legislator, and his primary objects were those of Henry I. 
in England — the establishment of a definite law, the diminution of the 
power of the baronage, some increase in the power of the commons 
to counterbalance the barons, and the strengthening of the crown. But he 
did not make himself popular, and he did incur bitter hostility. The result 
was a plot for his assassination, which was carried out at Perth. The band 
of murderers broke into the house where he was lying. The king was 
sitting with the queen and her ladies. He was unarmed, and at the noise 
of the assassins' approach was hastily concealed in a cellar under the floor. 
The murderers broke in, searched for him in vain, and retired ; the king 
came out of his hiding-place. When they were heard returning, Catherine 



224 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

Douglas — " Catherine Bar-lass" — thrust her arm through the staples of 
the door and held it while the king got back into the cellar ; but that slender 
bolt did not prevent the door from being burst open. Again the room was 
searched, and the entry to the cellar was discovered. The armed assassins 
leapt down upon him ; the king with his bare hands almost succeeded in 
slaying one of them, but was himself despatched by their daggers. There 
is a tragic fitness in the dramatic end of the king who sang his own love- 
romance in verse which has given him an assured place among the poets. 

Among the Scottish nobility no house was so powerful, none held such 
wide domains, none possessed so high a reputation for knightly valour as 
that of Douglas. From the good Lord James, the " Black Douglas/' the 
most picturesque of all the Bruce's comrades-in-arms, to the hero of 
Otterburn and the luckless warrior of Homildon Hill and Shrewsbury fight, 
the Douglases were ever " bonny fighters." But in the reign of James II. 
the house of the Black Douglas waxed so powerful as to be a positive danger 
to the crown, and even, according to its enemies, to Scottish nationality ; 
since the strife between the Stewart dynasty and its mighty vassal drove the 
latter into relations with England which at the best were compromising. 
During the greater part of the young king's minority, indeed, the Douglases 
did not take the opportunity to strike for power. The struggle was rather 
between two high officials, Livingstone and Crichton, who only united for 
the purpose of striking down one of the Douglases who threatened to 
obtain a personal ascendency over the boy-king's mind. But when William 
Douglas succeeded to the earldom in 1443, the Douglas activities became 
ominous. William extended his own dominions by marriage so that half 
the Lowlands were under his sway ; he procured an earldom also for his 
brother, and he made a " bond " with Crawford, the greatest of the northern 
earls. An outbreak of English border warfare in 1448 gave the Douglases 
renewed opportunity for gaining prestige as soldiers. Over the Douglas 
domains the royal authority was practically ignored. In 1452, young 
James, being then just twenty, met his great feudatory with the apparent 
intention of effecting a reconciliation ; but instead of doing so, he lost his 
temper and stabbed the earl with his own hand. From that moment the 
feud between the crown and the Douglases became open. For the next 
three years something not unlike the English War of the Roses was going 
on in Scotland ; but the conclusion was the overthrow of the great house of 
Douglas in 1455. By its downfall, another branch of the family, the " Red " 
Douglases of Angus, who had supported the crown against the ''Black" 
Douglases, rose to the front rank. 

During the next five years James ruled with vigour, and utilised the 
dissensions of York and Lancaster for operations against the English, at 
least whenever the Yorkists were dominant. It was while besieging 
Roxburgh, a fortress still held by the English, that James was killed in his 
thirtieth year by the explosion of a cannon. In spite of his wild deed 
when, at the age of twenty, James murdered William Douglas in a fit of 



LANCASTER AND YORK 225 

passion as Robert Bruce had slain the Red Comyn, he gave promise in 
the few years that remained of proving an exceedingly capable ruler ; but 
his premature death again plunged Scotland into the woes of a long 
regency. 

Yet, for five years the country was governed with no little skill and states- 
manship by Bishop Kennedy ; even after his death, matters went not 
altogether ill. Perhaps the most interesting event of these years was the 
marriage of the young king to Margaret of Denmark. Under the marriage 
treaty, Denmark handed over to Scotland the Orkneys and Shetlands, 
which had hitherto remained part of the Scandinavian dominions, in pledge 
of the payment of a considerable sum of money as the bride's dowry. The 
money was never paid, and thus the islands became part of the Scottish 
kingdom. 

In fact, the whole period of the regency was not in itself disastrous ; 
but it did not have the same effect as the continuation of rule by a strong 
king such as James II. promised to be. Unhappily, James III. was not the 
man to carry out a strong policy. From the time when he came of age he 
fell into the hands of low-born favourites, despised as upstarts by the whole 
of the nobility. James. himself was born out of due time, a lover of the 
arts and devoid of those qualities essential to a king who had to rule over 
a turbulent and warlike nobility and people. In the general dissatisfac- 
tion, the king's brother, the Duke of Albany, developed ambitious designs of 
taking James's place on the throne. He was driven from the country, and 
intrigued with Edward IV. for a restoration which was to give him the 
crown as a vassal of England. Instead of carrying out that plan, how- 
ever, he effected a temporary reconciliation with his brother ; but the 
obvious hollowness cf this drove him to renew his negotiations with Edward, 
and in 1483 he was in effect again expelled from Scotland. His death in 
France by an accident at a tournament relieved Scotland of this particular 
danger. The final disasters of James's reign befell only after Henry VII. had 
secured the English crown. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE MIDDLE AGES 
I 

POLITICAL ASPECTS 

The landmark which British historians select as setting the boundary 
between the medieval and the modern is the accession of the house of 
Tudor. There was, in fact, no sudden and violent change at that particular 
moment. But in the hundred years or so of which 1485 is approximately 
the central point, events occurred and movements culminated which 
differentiate the medieval from the modern world. The political structure 
of Western Christendom was changed ; the boundaries of the known world 
were expanded ; the fetters by which intellectual progress had been bound 
were broken ; and we may pause to inquire what were the characteristic 
features of what we call the Middle Ages which distinguish them from what 
we call modern times. 

The first and most obvious fact is that Western Christendom was 
practically acquainted with only quarter of the Eastern Hemisphere, one- 
eighth of the world known to us to-day, namely, the western quarter lying 
north of the Equator. All that lay beyond was either a sheer blank or a 
region of travellers' tales and nothing more. To the inhabited world as 
known to the Romans was added during the Middle Ages so much of 
Europe as lies between the Baltic Sea and the Danube, together with 
Norway and Sweden. In short, the entire civilised world as known to 
Christendom meant Europe west of what is now Russia, Asia west of the 
Euphrates, and the Mediterranean coast of Africa. 

These were the physical limitations whose disappearance differentiates 
the medieval from the modern. Next to it we must place a distinction of 
another kind. Medieval Europe was dominated by the Roman conception 
of the Empire as a universal political dominion, and by the Christian con- 
ception of the Church as a universal theocratic dominion ; both involving 
the idea of the fundamental unity of Christendom in opposition to the 
common enemy, whether regarded as the barbarian from the political 
point of view or the infidel from the ecclesiastical. All Christendom, 
however, setting aside always the Greek Empire and the Greek Church, 
recognised vaguely one temporal head in the Emperor and one spiritual 

head in the Pope. 

226 



THE MIDDLE AGES 227 

Closely associated with this, perhaps merely another aspect of it, is the 
fact that medievalism was the outcome of the collision between the elabor- 
ate civilisation of the Christianised Roman Empire and the tribal civilisa- 
tion of the Teutonic barbarians. For the mixture of these two civilisations, 
resulting from the Teutonic conquest, produced Feudalism. A political 
organisation based on the Empire, a religious organisation based on the 




An English knight in full caparison, 1345. 
[Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and his wife, from the Luttrell Psalter.] 



Papacy, and a social structure resting on Feudalism, were the fundamental 
bases of medievalism. . 

Next, if we seek to discover what was the fundamental medieval con- 
ception of the function of government, we shall find it in the compulsory 
subordination of the interests of individual persons or communities to the 
interests of the community in general, as conceived by those in whom the 
power was vested — a qualification of no small importance. In the medieval 
idea, there is practically no limit to the right of intervention by fully con- 
stituted authority. It is by universal assent warranted in carrying the 
interference and regulation down to the minutest details. It may regulate 
a man's clothes, the prices at which he sells or buys labour or goods, his 



228 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

employment, his very thoughts. There is no question in the medieval 
mind that authority possesses this right ; though the power to enforce it 
may be wanting. The modern problems as to the limits of State interfer- 
ence had not suggested themselves. The question which did arise was a 
different one — whether the authority which claimed the right was precisely 
the authority which possessed it ; to which the answer could often be ascer- 
tained only by an appeal to force. In the language of modern political 
science, the question where the sovereignty resided was in constant dis- 
pute, because the relative amounts of physical force under the control of the 
different claimants to authority were open to doubt. The one indisputable 
fact was that the superior control of physical force did not lie with the 
masses of the population, and therefore the sovereignty did not reside in 
them. The conflict as to sovereignty still continues in modern times, but 
on somewhat different lines. 

Most notable in the Middle Ages was the political conflict between the 
ecclesiastical and the temporal claims. The Spiritual endeavoured to 
dominate the Secular authority ; the Church claimed to control the State. 
For two hundred years, from Hildebrand to Boniface VIII., the Popes very 
nearly made good their claim. For another two hundred years they did 
not surrender it. But the Reformation and the counter-Reformation taken 
together left the Papacy wholly without control over temporal affairs out- 
side the States of the Church in Italy. As between the secular and the 
spiritual powers, the question was no longer whether the State should sub- 
mit to being treated as in bondage to the Church, but whether the Church 
should be treated as in bondage to the State. 

Thus in the medieval world the primary conflict of authorities was that 
between the spiritual and the secular, the Church and the State, which in 
modern times, at least in the leading States of Europe, fell completely into the 
background. But in the field of religion itself there was no such conflict. The 
modern spirit seeks to distinguish between matters which are and matters 
which are not proper objects for the compelling intervention of authority; and 
in the modern view authority has nothing to say to the private opinions of 
the individual. What he believes or disbelieves concerns no one but 
himself, so long, at least, as he does not force his views upon his neigh- 
bours. Moreover, what a man believes is that which satisfies his reason ; 
you cannot make him believe or disbelieve to order ; you can only control 
his professions. He himself even cannot force himself to believe what he 
would like to believe. But in the medieval view, false opinions were a 
proof of moral obliquity. As concerned religion at least, authority pro- 
nounced upon the truth absolutely, and no one could be permitted to 
question its pronouncement. Nor was there any doubt where the authority 
lay. Rome was the final Court of Appeal. The Reformation was in one 
of its aspects the repudiation of Rome as the ultimate authority, whether 
the reformers substituted for it the authority of the Scriptures, or of the 
Church Universal, or recognised no appeal except to human reason. In 



THE MIDDLE AGES 229 

the field of religion the change from medievalism was one from the 
acceptance of an established ultimate authority to a conflict of authorities 
or to the repudiation of all authority. 

The second conflict was that between the crown and the great nobles, 
between the centralising and the centrifugal forces ; the crown always 
seeking to extend the single authority over a wide area, the baronage 
commonly seeking to preserve a congeries of practically independent units 
with a single supreme untrammelled authority in each. This is crossed 
by a separate contest on the part of the cities to set up a distinct authority 
of their own. This battle was not fully fought out during the Middle 
Ages, and in Britain it followed a course markedly different from that 
which it took on the Continent. But in the main it stands true that the 
fundamental political struggle was that between the centralising pressure of 




A Royal carriage and its escort about 1480. 

the crown and the disintegrating pressure of feudalism ; in which centralisa- 
tion carried the day, but usually, outside of Britain, left monarchy and 
aristocracy in close alliance and mutual dependence. Thence arose the 
modern conflict between the monarchy joined with the aristocracy on the 
one hand, and on the other the commons of the middle class, and ulti- 
mately the proletariat, tending to transfer the seat of authority from the 
former to the latter. 

The foregoing generalisations with regard to the Middle Ages must 
be qualified when we turn our attention to particular countries, and 
especially in the case of our own country. Geographical conditions 
kept the British Isles apart from the rest of Western Christendom as 
they had kept them apart from the Roman Empire. Britain was never 
completely Romanised, and the Teutonic invader did not in effect find 
himself in contact with Roman civilisation. Roman influences hardly 
touched him, and his isolation prevented him from being materially affected 
by the changes in the Teutonic civilisation of the Continent. The English 



2 3 o NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

stood outside the new Holy Roman or German Empire more completely 
than the Britons had remained outside the old Roman Empire. To a 
greater degree they were brought within the ecclesiastical dominion of the 
Holy See, but still in a very much less degree than their continental 
neighbours. A Saxon king of England could appropriate to himself the 
imperial title of " Basileus," implying a claim to equality with the 
Emperor, and a Pope could designate the Archbishop of Canterbury, "papa 
alterius orbis," implying at least what in a secular dominion would be called 
vice-regal authority. To the English, as to every one else, the Pope and 
the Emperor were the two heads of Christendom by courtesy ; but the 
Pope exercised hardly any direct authority, and the Emperor none at all. 
Thus the people of these islands were able to follow out their development 
in comparative isolation on national lines, modified but not absorbed by 
the political organisation of the Empire, the ecclesiastical organisation of the 
Papacy, and the social structure of continental Feudalism. 

Accident united the North English to the Celtic kingdom of the Scots, 
and drew a dividing line between Scotland and England, from Solway to 
Tweed mouth ; so that Scotland and England developed their nationality 
separately, while both stood outside the general current which was mould- 
ing Europe. Neither the Norman Conquest nor the Angevin Succes- 
sion bridged the English Channel or effectively destroyed the isolation 
which enabled them to consolidate their nationality apart. To some 
extent the Scandinavian kingdoms also remained apart ; that is, as States 
they remained outside the borders of the Empire, though they planted their 
colonies not only in England, Scotland, and Ireland, but in France, in 
Sicily, and in Southern Italy. The aggression of the Scandinavians, how- 
ever, ceased after the eleventh century. 

But the national idea was not confined to the British Isles and Scandi- 
navia, the two great divisions which never came within the boundaries of 
the Empire. During the Middle Ages, France too became an individual 
nation and the Spanish Peninsula was also nationalised. Both France and 
Northern Spain were included in the Empire of Charlemagne ; and it was 
only when the Carolingian dynasty which ruled over the western portion of 
the Frankish dominion gave place to the dynasty of the Capets that France 
was definitely and permanently separated from the Empire. And France 
was then already completely in the grip of the feudal system. Hence the 
consolidation both of England and of Scotland long preceded the consoli- 
dation of France. It was not till after the final expulsion of the English 
that the process was completed. Almost at the same time the similar pro- 
cess was completed in the Spanish Peninsula. The union of the crowns 
of Aragon and Castile, and the overthrow of the Moorish kingdom of 
Granada, shaped the Peninsula into the two greater and smaller nations of 
Spain and Portugal, somewhat as the island of Great Britain had been 
shaped into the greater and smaller nations of England and Scotland. 
Thus there were at the last three great national States on the west of Europe, 



THE MIDDLE AGES 231 

besides Scotland and Portugal. But a like process of consolidation had 

not taken place in Central Europe. Germany was still only a collection 

of Teutonic States professing allegiance and a 

very limited obedience to one Emperor ; while 

Italy was a collection of small Latin States, 

individually far in advance of the rest of the 

world in culture, but without any effective 

sense of common nationality. The republic 

of Venice had built up a great maritime power, 

and her fleets were still one of the bulwarks 

of Europe against the Ottoman Turks, who, 

in 1453, finally overthrew the Byzantine 

Empire when they captured Constantinople ; 

but though she might fairly be called an 

imperial city, Venice did not constitute a 

nation. 

At the very close of our period, Charles 
the Rash of Burgundy endeavoured to build 
up what we should call another first-class 
Power. With the Netherlands and the Bur- 
gundies already under his dominion, it was 
his ambition to construct a heterogeneous 
kingdom which should extend from the North 
Sea to the Mediterranean. That design was 
frustrated, and Provence, as well as the Duchy 
of Burgundy, was absorbed into France. 
But what happened instead in the course of 
the next fifty years was that the Austrian 
House of Hapsburg built up for its members 
through a series of marriages a huge dominion 
which comprised the Austrian duchies of 
South Germany, the Magyar and Slavonic 
kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the whole 
Burgundian inheritance, the Spanish kingdom, 
and some slices of Italy, besides permanently 
appropriating the succession to the imperial 
crown. Although this vast dominion with its 
numerous nationalities was parted between 
two branches of the house of Hapsburg, 
it not only expanded the Spanish dominion, 
but made the Austrian Hapsburgs a first-class 
Power exercising a dominant influence over 
the States of Germany. Consequently, international politics assumed a 
phase unknown in the medieval period ; so that the keynote of European 
diplomacy came to be found in the phrase, " the Balance of Power." 




A complete suit of Gothic armour, about 

1470. 

[From the Wallace Collection.] 



232 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

That is to say, while each State sought a preponderance for itself, it 
sought also to keep the other States equally balanced. Hitherto England 
had been concerned only in her private contests with France or with 
Scotland ; now she became concerned to prevent either France or the 
Hapsburgs from dominating Europe. 

Since England was so far the first to consolidate her own nationality, it 
naturally resulted that she progressed in constitutional development at a 
very much greater speed than the European States. The conflict of authority 
between the Papacy and the Crown was less acute because England was 
out of reach of the Papacy itself, and the ecclesiastical organisation in 
England was at once less under Papal control and less able to challenge 
the supremacy of the secular power. In England, never completely sur- 
rendered to feudalism, the Crown was able at an earlier stage to concen- 
trate power in its own hands. The baronage in their resistance to absolutism 
became the champions of popular rights as well as of the privileges of their 
own order. The Crown followed suit, and in its resistance to baronial 
encroachments extended the popular rights. And thus at the close of the 
Middle Ages, England was the one State in which the next constitutional 
battle was to be fought with the sovereignty of the Commons as the stake ; 
because it was the one State in which the Commons had already accumu- 
lated a solid and tangible authority. 



II 
SOCIAL ASPECTS 

When we turn to the social aspect of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves 
contemplating an era of violent contrasts ; of supreme picturesqueness and 
of extreme discomfort ; of gorgeous display and of sordid squalor ; of con- 
summate courtesy and of utter pitilessness ; of high saintliness and of bestial 
grossness ; of the faith that knows no fear but that of God, and of the 
superstition in which fear of the Devil is ever dominant. Side by side we 
see Joan of Arc in her sublime purity and the degraded terrors of her mur- 
derers ; beside Anselm, William Rufus ; the Black Prince serving at his 
royal prisoner's table and massacring the inhabitants of Limoges. 

The contrasts of the Middle Ages are more vivid than those of the 
present day, not because they were more real, but because they stood in 
closer proximity. In modern times we compare the conditions of class and 
class, the luxurious ease of the wealthy with the destitution of the slums. 
The Middle Ages knew no such wealth, no such luxury, and no such 
destitution, at least in England. The contrasts of medieval life are of a 
different order ; they are those between its public and its private aspects ; 
between the gorgeousness and what would be to our eyes the meanness of 
its different phases. The mail-clad knight rode abroad in glittering armour, 



THE MIDDLE AGES 233 

but he did not habitually sleep in a bed. He carved the casques of the foe- 
man with flashing steel, but he ate his dinner with his fingers. The castle 
or the manor-house owned a spacious hall, but no other apartment which 
deserved to be called much more than a closet ; and few indeed were they 
who enjoyed the privacy of a separate chamber. 
Hunting and hawking were joyous pastimes when 
woods and fields were green and the days were 
long ; but when the sluggard sun rose late and set 
early, and the hall was lighted with torches, the 
time was apt to hang heavily in spite of the occa- 
sional diversion supplied by some wandering jongleur. 
A time came when commerce expanded and bur- 
gesses waxed wealthy, but they would seem for the 
most part to have had little idea of spending their 
wealth except on an ostentatious display in costly 
apparel and rich decorations intended for the public 
eye, and to have taken very little thought for the 
amenities or even what we should call the decencies 
of personal comfort. 

Of the whole population only a small propor- 
tion dwelt in cities, and even of these a substantial 
part were occupied in tilling the borough lands. 
The great bulk of the population was engaged upon 
agriculture, and how they fared we have little means 
of knowing with any certainty. The land under 
ordinary conditions was self-sufficing ; that is to 
say, in normal seasons it produced a sufficiency 
of grain to feed the entire population. The small 
peasant-holdings and the common waste lands 
enabled the smallest peasants to keep their poultry, 
their pigs, and their cow ; and in normal seasons 
there was little destitution. But a modern labourer 
in decently steady employment would certainly be 
better housed, and would regard as practical necessi- 
ties luxuries which his medieval ancestor never 
heard of. The most notable change between the 
medieval and the modern conditions of working- 
class life is that which set in with the beginnings 
of the Industrial Revolution only a century and a 
half ago, a change which created a vast city 
population ; but the one point in respect of which the modern working- 
man is infinitely and indisputably better off than his medieval pre- 
decessors is in the disappearance of those pestilences like the Black 
Death, whose recurrence in Europe sanitary science seems now to have 
rendered practically impossible. 




An English knight of 1400. 



234 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

It remains to touch upon the two features of the Middle Ages which 
appeal most vividly and picturesquely to the imagination. The Middle 
Ages were the days of the monks and of the armoured knights. During 
the sixteenth century the knights armed in full panoply disappeared ; monas- 
teries and nunneries were suppressed wholesale, or, as in England, vanished 
altogether ; the clergy, regular and secular, ceased to be a prominently 
picturesque element. 

But throughout the ages which preceded the Reformation the monas- 
teries were not merely picturesque ; 
they performed functions which 
were of vital importance. When 
authority failed to enforce law and 
order, when violence defied control, 
the monastery and the convent gave 
shelter and protection against law- 
less tyranny. When war and the 
chase provided almost the only 
living interests for men of gentle 
blood, art and learning could still 
find shelter and encouragement in 
abodes dedicated to religion and to 
peace ; though the scope of both 
was rigidly limited, if not actually 
to the service of religion at least 
to fields which religion regarded as 
serviceable. It was the clerks who kept alive the study of law, of philosophy, 
and of science, though these latter especially were strictly subordinated 
to theology. To the clerks in the main we are indebted for historical 
records. And, finally, the Church was the one institution in which, theoreti- 
cally at least, class distinctions disappeared, and even in practice humble 
birth was not a bar to high achievement ; the one institution also which, 
whether wisely or unwisely, provided relief for the destitute and needy. 

The glory of the mail-clad knight belonged to the days when victories 
were won in the shock of hand-to-hand fighting and sheer weight was 
irresistible. He was already doomed when it was found that neither 
he nor his horse could be protected against the clothyard shafts of the 
English archer. Defensive armour became so appallingly heavy that 
it produced immobility, and at last gave the light-armed man the advan- 
tage even in hand-to-hand fighting, as was illustrated at the battle of 
Agincourt. But even more fatal to him, and fatal too in the long run 
to the archer, was the progressive use of gunpowder. Down to the close 
of the fifteenth century gunpowder was practically useless in the field, 
although at Cr6cy the English had some primitive cannon which they 
fired off — to the alarm of the Frenchmen's horses, but otherwise apparently 
without doing any damage. But in siege operations gunpowder was 




A MS. representation of a house. 
[From a 14th century romance.] 



THE MIDDLE AGES 



2 1$ 



already playing an important part in the wars of Henry V., and hand-guns 
are heard of in the War of the Roses. Henceforth, Hotspur's "villainous 
saltpetre " had to be reckoned with to a rapidly increasing extent, and 
long before the end of the Tudor period the art and practice of gunnery 
had become a decisive factor in fighting by land and by sea. 



Ill 



INTELLECTUAL ASPECTS 




A puppet-show. 



The Middle Ages are, not quite without wan ant, condemned as an era of 
intellectual stagnation, a period with no art, no literature, no science, and no 
philosophy. The best literature of the ancient world was lost, its temples 
and its statues were buried in ruins ; 
its pagan philosophies had been ruled 
out by ecclesiastical dogmas which 
imposed rigid limitations upon all in- 
quiring spirits, and stamped as impious 
all investigation of phenomena for 
which the Church found a supernatural 
origin, or such as threatened to throw 
doubt upon her authoritative pro- 
nouncements. Knowledge and dis- 
covery are 1 necessarily bounded by 
the limitations of the human intellect ; 
but to these were added the artificial limitations of theological dogmas. 

Intellectual stagnation, however, is after all an incorrect description of 
the result. Stagnation is the antithesis of activity, and there was no absence 
of intellectual activity. Sterility rather than stagnation is the correct word, 
because the activities were directed into unproductive channels. Neverthe- 
less, revolt had begun long before the fifteenth century ; and the British 
Isles can claim to have been the birthplace of men who gave a great stimulus 
to intellectual emancipation. Such were Duns Scotus in the latter half of 
the thirteenth century, as to whom it is uncertain whether his birthplace 
was in Ireland or in. Scotland or the north of England ; William Occam, 
an Englishman who was possibly a pupil of Duns Scotus ; and John Wiclif, 
the pioneer of the Reformation. Even more remarkable than any of these 
was Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar, the pupil and friend of the great 
Bishop Grossetete, the greatest among the pioneers of scientific inquiry, 
who indeed deserves to be called the father of modern science ; the prophet 
of the great doctrine that religious truth cannot suffer from the increase 
of scientific knowledge. But in the Middle Ages no man could be more 
than a pioneer. Emancipation did not arrive until the sixteenth century. 
Until then, the too independent thinker was assured of condemnation 



236 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

as a heretic, and the scientific experimentalist of condemnation as a necro- 
mancer. 

Art, too, was almost restricted to the service of religion, and in that 
service one branch of it flourished. Architecture found scope in the build- 
ing of churches and cathedrals; upon them piety lavished wealth, labour, 
and imagination. The monk, too, in his cloister could glorify God by pro- 
ducing masterpieces of decorative penmanship and wonders of illumination. 
The art of the painter revived in Italy, but it was still confined to the service 
of the Church and to subjects which tended to edification. Beyond Italy 
it hardly spread, and in England was practically unknown. 

A people may do without art, but literature of some kind it must have, if 
only in the shape of folk-tales, folk-songs, and war-songs. But a national 
literature implies a national language, and that which is preserved by oral 
tradition alone can only be exceedingly limited. An English literature had 
not come into existence before the Norman Conquest, except in the form of 
the songs of the countryside and the ballads, of which only fragments 
survived in writing ; such as the song of the primitive hero Beowulf, the 
poem of the monastic servitor Caedmon who sang of the beginning of things, 
the battle lays of Brunanburh and Maldon preserved in the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle. The men who wrote, wrote in Latin almost exclusively. The 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the only prose monument of pre-Conquest English, 
and that is a mere compilation. 

After the Conquest there was not for a very long time a national language ; 
that is to say, the tongue of the ruling classes was Norman-French, and 
English was the language only of the common folk. The learned wrote 
neither English nor Norman-French, but Latin. Geoffrey of Monmouth 
and Walter Map collected and embroidered, or invented, legends concerning 
King Arthur and others, lively romances to which they were pleased to give 
the name of history, but their Latin tales did not constitute English litera- 
ture. Something which deserves to be called the beginning of English 
literature appeared when the monk Layamon reproduced in an English 
poem, Brut, certain of the same legends. Brut was the mythical Trojan 
hero who gave his name to the islands of Britain. Layamon's poem was 
written in the reign of King John. Then for another century and a half the 
only literature which could be called popular consisted of French romances, 
prototypes of those which some centuries later perturbed the brain of Don 
Quixote. England, indeed, produced a real literary figure in the person of 
one of the best of medieval historians, Matthew Paris ; but he, like other 
men of learning, wrote not in the vernacular but in Latin. 

When the fourteenth century arrived, England was ceasing to be bi- 
lingual. If Norman-French was the language of the court, English modified 
by Norman-French had nevertheless become the common language of the 
gentry and of the common people. Moreover, the intellectual revival of 
Italy had just blossomed into sudden glory with Dante, and Dante was 
succeeded by Petrarch and Boccaccio. A wave of culture flowed over 




The Hierarchy of the Sciences as conceived by Medieval Thought. 

[From the BerrI Bible. ] 

237 



238 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

Europe, and the last half of the fourteenth century saw the creation of a 
true English Literature by William Langland, John Wiclif, and Geoffrey 
Chaucer in England, and Bishop Barbour in Scotland — for English is the 
only name which can properly be applied to the literary language of Scot- 
land as well as of England. Wiclifs rendering of the New Testament was 
the foundation of all subsequent English versions of the Scriptures. In 
William Langland the people of England first found a spokesman, though 
in the Vision of Piers Plowman his moral scourge spared the peasant no 

more than the upper ranks of society. 
Bishop Barbour was no great poet, 
yet there is often a fine spirit in the 
verse wherein he recorded the story 
of the liberation of Scotland, and the 
high deeds of his hero the Bruce. 
But in the literary hierarchy, none is 
on the same plane with Geoffrey 
Chaucer, the first master " maker " in 
the English tongue, who for nearly 
two hundred years remained without 
a peer. 

Langland, Wiclif, and Barbour all 
wrote in dialect ; Chaucer set the 
standard of English as a literary lan- 
guage. For generations to come he 
was the master, and all men who 
attempted to write poetry were his 
disciples, however far behind him 
they might lag. But Chaucer is not 
merely a craftsman in words, a 
magician in language ; not merely a 
consummate story-teller ; not merely a poet " as fresh as is the month 
of May," like his own u squyer," clean and sweet, overflowing with joyous 
vitality, with broad human sympathy, tender and humorous. Chaucer has 
painted for us the men and women of his day, the typical gathering which 
assembled for the Canterbury Pilgrimage, in such wise that they are as 
living and real as if we had met them, touched them, seen them with our 
own eyes, heard them talk with our own ears. They are alive now every 
one of them ; somewhat differently clothed of course, modified by some- 
what different conventions and by differences in the material circum- 
stances of life. The eternal human types belong to the twentieth century 
no less than to the fourteenth. But when the types are presented to us in 
medieval array, as they lived and moved five hundred years ago, the Middle 
Ages become as living and real as the twentieth century. Those familiar 
faces and figures make their surroundings real and actual. We are no 
longer guessing what sort of person a knight might have been or was likely 




Geoffrey Chaucer. 
[From a contemporary MS. in the British Museum.] 



THE MIDDLE AGES 239 

to be ; what manner of a man was a parish priest, a rural squire, a merchant ; 
what a prioress was like or a bourgeoise dame of independent means. We 
know them all, and knowing them we see also that, after all, it is merely 
the superficial accidents of life that have changed, not its fundamental 
conditions. 

There is another author of the fourteenth century who should not be 
passed by, the ingenious traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who indeed really led 
the way in the writing of English prose. For although he originally wrote 
the story of his travels, of what he had seen, and of what other travellers told 
him of what they had seen, in Latin, yet he employed the leisure of his 
later years in translating his work first into French and then into English. 
The work is not without its value, as a record of Sir John's personal experi- 
ences, but still more so as a demonstration of the unbounded credulity of 
the age. Marvels which would have awakened the genial scepticism of 

^JSC <£ t^ri0:m\Xmi0i ixttftenit mtmu$ prince 
%&Jp 6 eoise Vuc of <t Coime (£t& of maxx&pfc ante of 
fa^pm^/^vdetBa^BnC^tn of 6?w#G>n& a &uttna>t£ 
of fatwbioiteftBwh&v of fyn$i f&bvoox&h ^Utace 
of $*k ^t n $^ °f <£tt(jCan& mk of fmtice l 

A specimen of Caxton's printing. 
\ [From the introduction to the "Book of Chess," 1475.] 

Herodotus were cheerfully accepted without question by the English 
traveller. 

English literature burst into full blossom with Chaucer, but after 
Chaucer there came in England for a century and a half none but the 
most pedestrian of poets. Worthier successors than Lydgate and Gower 
were born in the northern kingdom, and chief among them the royal poet 
James I. His claim to the authorship of the Kingis Quair has been chal- 
lenged, but is not to be surrendered without more conclusive proofs than 
have yet been produced. King James learnt in the school of Chaucer; 
it is enough to say that he was a pupil of whom Chaucer himself would 
have been proud. The name of Robert Henryson also stands high above 
that of any contemporary English poet. 

But although poetry languished, and although the Morte Arthur of Sir 
Thomas Mallory is the one great English prose work of the fifteenth century, 
the impulse to literary expression was at work. Men began to say in 
English what a century before they would assuredly have written in Latin 
if at all. The dispersion of Greek scholarship with the fall of Constan- 
tinople in 1453 had something of the effect of an intellectual revelation. 
And yet, after all, the enormous impulse to the literary production of the 
centuries which followed was hardly so much the intellectual as the 



240 NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 

mechanical one. About the year 1440, Guthenberg in Germany invented 
the printing-press with movable types, which made possible the multiplica- 
tion of books, and by its development created a supply of which was begotten 
an ever-increasing demand. Books were brought within the reach of 
the many instead of being procurable only by the very few. The last 
quarter of the fifteenth century saw the introduction of the great invention 
into England, when, under the patronage of Edward IV., William Caxton set 
up his printing-press in Westminster Abbey. 



BOOK III 

THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

CHAPTER IX 

HENRY VII 
I 



PROBLEMS OF THE DYNASTY 

On the field of Bosworth, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was hailed as 
King Henry VII. Every king of England for three hundred years had 
been a Plantagenet ; had been, that is to say, a direct descendant in the 
male line from Henry II. This was true even of the Yorkist kings, since 
the father of Richard, Duke of York, was the son of Edmund of York, who 

DESCENDANTS OF JOHN OF GAUNT 

John of Gaunt, 
married 



(i) Blanche of 
Lancaster. 



Henry IV. 

Lancastrian 
king's. 



Elizabeth, in. 

Earl of 
Huntingdon. 

I 
John, Earl of 
Huntingdon. 

I 

Anne, m. 

Ralph Neville. 

I 

Earls of 

Westmoreland. 



Philippa, m. 

John, King of 

Portugal. 

. I 
Kings of 
Portugal. 



(2) Constance 
of Castile. 

Catherine, m. 
Henry of Castile. 

! 

Kings of Castile. 



Isabella, m. 

Ferdinand of 

Aragon. 

I 

Royal House of 

Spain. 



(3) Catherine 
Swynford. 



Beauforts. 
Tudors. 



was the younger brother of John of Gaunt. Now there was a new 
dynasty; and the fundamental fact of Henry VII.'s reign was the king's 
need for securing that dynasty. 

Now, if succession through females was barred, Henry could have no 
claim ; for it was through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, that he was de- 
scended from John of Gaunt. The heir to the throne in that case was the 
Earl of Warwick, the son of George of Clarence, the only living Planta- 
genet prince. If the succession of a female but not the claim through a 
female was barred, as was argued when Edward III claimed the Crown 

241 Q 



242 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

of France, the house of York. still had the priority over the house of 
Lancaster because it descended in the female line from Lionel of Clarence, 
the elder brother of John of Gaunt. On that hypothesis the De la Poles, 
the sons of Suffolk and of Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV., stood next to 
Warwick, or before him if he was excluded by the attainder of his father. 
If a woman in person could succeed to the Crown, the first claim lay with 
Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., and after her with her numerous sisters 
in order. Further, as a matter of fact, if the descent through females was 
not barred, there were other descendants of John of Gaunt senior to the 
Beauforts, apart from the doubt whether the legitimation of that family in 
the reign of Richard II. covered the claim to succession in any case. 
Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, was descended through his mother 
from the full sister of Henry IV. The royal houses of Castile and of 

DESCENDANTS OF RICHARD OF YORK 
Richard, Duke of York. 

! 

i i i i 

Edward IV. George of Elizabeth, m. Margaret, m. 

1 Clarence. John de la Pole Charles of 

| (Suffolk). Burgundy. 



Elizabeth, m. Catherine, m. Edward, Earl Margaret, | | 

Henry VII. W. Courtenay. of Warwick. Countess of John de la Pole, Brothers. 

Salisbury, m. Earl of Lincoln. o • 

Tudors. Marquess of Sir Richard Pole. o 

Exeter. 



Edward Lord Montague. Cardinal 

Courtenay, | Pole. 

Earl of Devon. Catherine, m. o 

o Earl of 

Huntingdon. 

Portugal might be barred as aliens, but both descended from daughters 
of John of Gaunt, and this claim was actually to be asserted a hundred 
years later. 

In all these circumstances, it is obvious that Henry could not claim the 
throne unless by right of conquest or by parliamentary title, like Henry IV. 
himself. But if he married Elizabeth of York, then the only living per- 
son who could challenge the title of their offspring would be the young 
Earl of Warwick. Therefore, in the first place, Henry made haste to secure 
a parliamentary title for himself. The first point was that he himself 
should be personally and authoritatively recognised as de jure king of 
England against all other claimants. For this reason he delayed his 
marriage with Elizabeth of York until i486, lest it should be pretended 
that he reigned only as her consort ; and he deferred her coronation for 
another year. But that marriage appeared to ensure complete security to 
his offspring, except possibly as against Warwick. And Warwick himself 
was held a secure prisoner in the Tower. 

Nevertheless, Henry's succession was obviously a triumph for the 
Lancastrian faction, and it was quite certain that there would be attempts 



HENRY VII 243 

on the part of the Yorkist faction to overthrow him. And it is to be 
remarked in this connection, that Henry himself had given colour to the 
doctrine that a woman was personally barred from the succession by 
taking the crown for himself and not for his own mother. Yorkist plots 
were certain to be fomented and fostered in the court of Edward IV. 's 
sister, Margaret of Burgundy, the widow of Charles the Rash and step- 
mother (not mother) of his heirs, who was prepared to go to any lengths 
to overthrow the usurper. Margaret did not, however, herself control 
Burgundian policy, though as dowager she held her own court and enjoyed 
her own estates. 

In a position so open to challenge, it was not enough for Henry that 
he should reign by grace of parliament, which might withdraw its favour. 
It was indeed of first-rate importance that he should retain its favour, 
but the necessity remained for concentrating effective power in his own 
hands. Such a concentration of power was comparatively a simple matter 
for Edward IV. in his later years, when he reigned by a quite indisputable 
title. It was by no means so easy for a king whose title was so uncertain 
as Henry's. Henry therefore was faced with a constitutional problem 
which the house of Lancaster had failed to solve successfully. 

Moreover, Henry had before him in a new field problems which had 
to be faced by all statesmen after his time, but had not presented themselves 
to his predecessors. Spain, by the union of the Crowns of Castile and 
Aragon, had created a new power. Maximilian, king of the Romans, the 
son and heir of the Hapsburg German Emperor, had married Mary, the 
daughter of '"Charles of Burgundy. She was now dead ; but the Bur- 
gundian inheritance passed to Philip, the child of this marriage ; and Philip 
would also be the heir of Maximilian. The consolidation of France had been 
almost completed by Louis XI. Thus there had come into being a group 
of great powers with diverse and conflicting interests. An international 
diplomacy was called for which was without precedent ; a new European 
system was coming into being ; and England had to take up her place 
in that system. 

II 

THE REIGN OF HENRY VII. 

Henry had not been long on the throne before there was an insurrection 
headed by Lord Lovel, who had been a partisan of Richard III. It was 
suppressed without difficulty. The birth of a son, Arthur, at the end of 
i486, served as an incentive to the Yorkists. A youth named Lambert 
Simnel appeared in Ireland, claiming to be the Earl of Warwick. Ireland 
was chosen because the house of York had always been popular in that 
country, where several of its members had been Lieutenants ; and the 
support of the most powerful of the nobility there could be relied upon. 



244 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Margaret of Burgundy and John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, espoused 
the cause of the pretender ; although Henry paraded the real Earl of 
Warwick through the streets of London to show that he was not in Ireland 
at all. Lincoln joined Simnel, and with a following consisting mainly 
of Irishmen and German mercenaries landed in England. The rebellion 
was crushed at the battle of Stoke, where Lincoln was killed and Simnel 
was taken prisoner. Henry, however, adopted the craftily lenient policy 

upon which he habitually 
acted. He avoided blood- 
shed ; opposition was 
smoothed away by his ap- 
parent benignity ; but fines 
and forfeitures at once filled 
Henry's own treasury and 
crippled his enemies for 
further activity. Lambert 
Simnel, a youth of humble 
birth, was relegated to ap- 
propriate service in the royal 
kitchens. The neutrality, 
if not always the active sup- 
port, of the greatest of the 
Irish nobles, Kildare, was 
ensured when he found his 
own complicity in the re- 
bellion ignored, and himself 
permitted to retain the office 
of Deputy, that is, of acting- 
Lieutenant, in Ireland. 

Another insurrection on 
behalf of the captive War- 
wick or of the De la Pole 
brothers was improbable. 
The years immediately 
following the Simnel fiasco 
were mainly occupied with international politics. Henry was extremely 
anxious to strengthen his own position by an alliance with the Spanish 
sovereigns, because he expected Spain to become the leading European 
power, while it was also one whose interests were not likely to conflict 
with his own. But to Spain, England was useful mainly if not entirely 
as a check upon France, and her value depended largely on the stability of 
the new dynasty, which was exceedingly dubious. Ferdinand of Aragon 
and Henry of England were men of the same type ; very crafty, very un- 
scrupulous, very proud of overreaching a neighbour in a bargain, but 
with a shrewd perception of exactly how far it was safe to go in trickery ; 




Henry VII. 
[From a contemporary bust by an Italian artist.] 



HENRY VII 245 

while each could gauge pretty accurately the precise extent to which the 
other was dependent on his aid. Neither could afford to quarrel with the 
other, but each wanted to get out of the other as much as he possibly 
could, and to give as little as he possibly could in return. During the first 
half of Henry's reign he was more in need of Ferdinand than Ferdinand was 
in need of him, and one-sided bargains were struck in favour of Spain. 
At a later stage, when the Tudor dynasty was thoroughly secured, the 
bargaining turned in favour of England so far as positive engagements 
were concerned ; but both monarchs evinced a surprising skill and plausi- 
bility in evading their respective obligations. 

Henry wanted a Spanish princess to be betrothed to his own infant 
son. Spain's price was the active intervention of Henry to prevent the 
French Crown from absorbing under its control the duchy of Brittany, 
which now alone of the great feudatory States was almost independent. 
Henry, forced into open war with France, on behalf of the young Duchess 
Anne, made use of his needs to obtain generous supplies from his parlia- 
ments while he carefully shirked the expenditure either of money or of blood. 
The Spaniards, on the other hand, found in their contest with the Moorish 
kingdom of Granada a sufficient excuse for abstaining from active operations 
in Brittany. Henry's own military operations were restricted to the occu- 
pation and garrisoning of sundry fortresses in Brittany, although he was 
careful to seek popularity for the war among his subjects by pretending to 
reassert the claim of his predecessors to the Crown of France. But the 
affair of Brittany was practically settled by the marriage of the youthful 
King of Frarrce, Charles VIIL, to the still more youthful Duchess of Brittany. 
Henry demanded indemnities and compensation before he would evacuate 
the Brittany fortresses ; he made ostentatious preparations for carrying on 
the war on a great scale, collecting a substantial war-fund. But Charles VIIL, 
being practically secure of Brittany, was now chiefly^ anxious to carry 
out ambitious schemes in Italy ; so by the Peace of Etaples he bought 
Henry off at his own price — which was paid in hard cash. The King of 
England did not again find it necessary to enter upon a foreign war ; and 
the net results of the whole business were that he had filled his treasury 
and secured for his sagacity the respect of Spanish rulers, with whom he 
was henceforth able to bargain upon more equal terms. 

But he had not done with Yorkist plots. That faction, having no living 
candidate whom they could put forward with a reasonable chance of 
success, endeavoured to resuscitate a dead one. If Richard, Duke of York, 
the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower, had not been 
murdered at all but was actually at large, he was unquestionably the legiti- 
mate king of England. Nobody could prove that he had actually been 
murdered. Richard, Duke of York, " Richard IV. " of England, came to 
life as a matter of course in Ireland. According to the confession sub- 
sequently put into his mouth, he was Peter Osbeck, familiarly known as 
Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boatman of Tournai. He had been care- 



246 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

fully educated to personate the murdered prince. He succeeded in obtaining 
recognition not only from Margaret of Burgundy, but for a time from 
the French Court, and afterwards still more definitely and completely from 
young King James IV. of Scotland, who married him to a kinswoman of 
his own, which he would certainly not have done unless he had honestly 
believed that Perkin's claim was genuine. 

Perkin appeared in Ireland in 1491, and of course found favour with 
the Yorkist nobility of that country. But there was no attempt at an 

immediate insur- 
rection in his 
favour, and in 1492 
he was received at 
the French Court, 
at the moment 
when Henry was 
threatening a great 
invasion. Charles, 
however, had no 
hesitation in dis- 
missing him in 
order to secure the 
Peace of Etaples, 
and Perkin betook 
himself to Margaret 
in Burgundy. 
There his educa- 
tion for the role of 
Richard of York 
were concocted — and 
Just when they 




The Hundred Men's Hall at St. Cross, near Winchester. 
[An early 16th century hall.] 



was completed. There also the Yorkist plots 

were duly reported to Henry by his own secret agents. 

seemed to be coming to a head, the king struck down the principal 

conspirators in England, including Sir William Stanley, who at Bosworth 

had commanded the division which secured the victory to Henry. 

This was at the beginning of 1495. In the summer, Warbeck was rash 
enough to sail from Flanders and attempt a landing in Kent, where he 
was very thoroughly beaten off. Then he tried Ireland, but found that the 
unusually capable governor, Sir Edward Poynings, had the country too 
well in hand ; and he went off to James IV. in Scotland. James's favour 
carried him so far that in 1496 he raided England, but still there was no 
rising in England on Perkin's behalf. Then the Scots king's zeal cooled, 
and the adventurer again betook himself to Ireland. But the Scots raid 
had given Henry an excuse for raising a subsidy for national defence ; and 
the folk of Cornwall had a strong objection to being taxed for the protection 
of the northern counties against the Scots. The Cornishmen rose and 
marched up to London to demand the removal of " the king's evil coun- 



HENRY VII 247 

sellors." When they got to Blackheath they fell an easy prey to the 
Royalist troops. Large numbers of them fell in the futile battle, but the 
survivors were pardoned with the exception of three ringleaders. 

The Cornishmen were under the unfortunate impression that this 
leniency was a sign of weakness on the part of the king. It was just at 
this moment that Perkin left Scotland for Ireland. The Cornishmen 
invited him to come over. He came ; but the country did not rise in his 
favour ; on the contrary, the gentry of Devon took arms for the king. 
Perkin deserted his 
followers and took sanc- 
tuary at Beaulieu, where 
he was soon induced to 
surrender. On his usual 
principles, Henry put 
very few of the rebels to 
death, but accumulated 
a useful harvest of fines 
and confiscations. The 
pretender himself was 
forced to read a public 
confession of his im- 
posture, and was then 
placed in a by no means 
rigid confinement. A 
year later he attempted 
to escape, and this led to 
his imprisonment in the Tower, where the unlucky Warwick was also shut 
up. The two young men were allowed or induced to concoct a fresh con- 
spiracy, or what passed for a conspiracy ; when it was " detected " Perkin 
was hanged and Warwick was beheaded. The Yorkists had no one to 
fall back upon except the De la Poles, of whom the eldest was now Earl 
of Suffolk, and was unlikely to prove a dangerous pretender. It had 
become perfectly clear at last that the Tudor was impregnably established 
on the throne of England. 

A series of marriages and deaths now claim our attention. Joanna, the 
second daughter and ultimately the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella, was 
married in 1496 to the Archduke, Philip of Burgundy, the son of Maxi- 
milian. This was to have the effect of joining the Burgundian with the 
Spanish heritage under the sway of the child of the marriage, Charles — 
who became famous as the Emperor Charles V. — although the Austrian 
heritage was transferred to his brother, Ferdinand. This marriage made 
Henry the more urgent in desiring the union of the younger daughter, 
Katharine of Aragon, to his own heir, Arthur, Prince of Wales. The 
marriage treaties were a matter of long haggling and dispute. Six months 
after the marriage was actually completed, in 1501, Arthur died, and the 




The political Game of Cards : a contemporary French satire on the 

European situation about 1500. 





A shilling of Henry VII. 

[Called a testoon from the fact of the head being, for the first time, 
in profile.] 



248 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

second son, Henry, became heir to the throne. At once it became a 
primary object with the king to secure Katharine for the young Henry. Such 
a marriage was contrary to canon law, and there was no wholly satisfactory 
precedent for a papal dispensation in a precisely similar case. Nevertheless, 
a dispensation was actually obtained from Pope Julius II., on the ground 
that the marriage was never consummated ; still, the wedding did not 
actually take place until after the accession of Henry VIII. 

The next marriage which had an important bearing on subsequent 
history was that which Henry negotiated between his eldest daughter, 

Margaret, and James IV. of 
Scotland. James had made 
himself troublesome over the 
affair of Perkin Warbeck, and 
Henry was anxious to provide 
by the marriage a permanent 
basis for friendly relations with 
the Northern Kingdom ; nor 
did he shrink from recognising 
the ultimate possibility, realised 
a hundred years afterwards, 
that an actual union of the Crowns might some day result. So James 
Stuart married Margaret Tudor, and their great-grandson, James VI. of 
Scotland, became also, in 1603, James I. of England. Henry, however, 
failed to obtain from James a decisive promise of the dissolution of the 
long-standing alliance between Scotland and France. 

The death of Henry's own wife, Elizabeth of York, removed from him 
one who seems always to have exercised a beneficial influence on his 
moral character. Both Henry and Ferdinand of Aragon conspicuously 
degenerated, morally, after the death of their respective wives. In Arch- 
bishop Morton also Henry had lost an admirable minister, whose influence 
had probably checked the development of the sordid side of his character. 
The closing years of Henry's life were mean and ugly, and colour unduly 
the popular impressions of his whole reign. To them belong unsavoury 
records of extortion and corruption, and records still more unsavoury; as 
of the king's possible design of himself marrying his widowed daughter-in- 
law, and his undoubted proposal to marry her sister Joanna when she had 
become a widow by the death of Philip of Burgundy, although all the world 
knew that she was insane. 

For full fifteen years of his reign Henry's record had been emphatically 
a clean one, marred only at its close by a single act of gross injustice, the 
execution of Warwick, for no crime except that he was a possible figure- 
head for Yorkist plots. Had he died before his wife he would have been 
remembered as a great, though hardly as a lovable, ruler ; since he lived 
till 1509 we are apt to think of him chiefly as the meanest of English 
kings. 



HENRY VII 



249 



III 



HENRY'S SYSTEM 




Bedesmen, temp. Keniy VII. 



When Henry VII. possessed himself of the Crown of England, the 
future before him was anything but promising. He was king, but on all 
sides there were possible claimants who could show a better title by de- 
scent than his own. For half a century the country had been ridden by 
factions, torn by dissensions. Its arms had ceased to inspire fear ; on the 
Continent, since Bedford's death, it had been 
held of little account ; even Edward IV. had 
satisfied Louis XI. that nothing serious was 
to be feared from England. At home there 
was hardly a recognised seat of political 
authority. The Crown was discredited by 
the imbecility of its wearer even before king- 
making came into fashion. The parliament 
had been allowed to assume an authority 
which it had failed to convert into an efficient 
control. The old baronage had been wiped 
out and replaced by a new baronage which 
lacked both power and prestige. The treasury 

was empty though the country was not poor. But there were three 
fundamental principles which provided a basis for political reconstruction, 
principles which had become thoroughly rooted, which no government 
could ignore without bringing destruction upon itself. Justice must be 
administered according to the law ; legislation was invalid without consent 
of parliament ; taxation could be imposed only with the consent of the 
people's representatives. 

For the restoration of international prestige Henry adopted the methods 
not of Edward III. or of Henry V. but of a new diplomacy ; till each of 
the European Powers was forced to recognise that the goodwill of 
England could not be neglected. We have now to see how he dealt with 
the great domestic problem. 

It was essential that the nominal authority and the actual power should 
be concentrated in the same hands ; that both should be wielded by the 
Crown. Yet the dynasty existed on sufferance. It could not be main- 
tained in the face of popular antagonism or by sheer terrorism ; yet it 
would survive merely as a pageant, if the Crown were at the mercy of 
popular caprice. Hence it was imperative that the Crown should at once 
conciliate popular favour, secure a full treasury, and paralyse antagonistic 
forces. This complex process demanded exceedingly deft manipulation. 



250 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

The treasury must be filled, but not by excessive demands on the 
purses of the commons. The nobility must not be allowed to become 
dangerous. The Crown must shun all appearance of tyranny. The king 
then must display himself as above all things a law-abiding man claiming 
no questionable rights. Henry began his career by being ostentatiously 
deferential to parliament. Richard had held only one, and Edward for a 
dozen years had ruled practically without a parliament. Henry during 
the first half of his reign summoned parliaments repeatedly, took them 
into his confidence, made them partner of his actions. There were no 

arbitrary trials and executions ; parlia- 
ment passed the Acts of attainder. The 
king's business was only to exercise the 
royal clemency judiciously. The king 
did not ask parliament for excessive 
grants. The national honour demanded 
war with France, and the nation would 
do its duty in providing necessary funds. 
The nation did. A judicious economy 
made a sufficient show without spending 
the money. A judicious diplomacy did 
what the advocates of a scientific tariff 
seek to do to-day — it made the foreigner 
pay. By wars and rumours of wars 
Henry filled his coffers instead of empty- 
ing them. 

The very uncertainty of the Tudor 
tenure of the crown was made pro- 
ductive. Every revolt and every plot 
provided its crop of attainders ; but a 
clement monarch indulged in no vin- 
dictive bloodshed ; treason was for the most part sufficiently punished by 
the confiscation of lands and wealth. The royal revenues expanded, and 
possible enemies were deprived of the sinews of war. Justice was satisfied 
and no one could hint at tyranny, while the commons, untouched, had no 
cause of complaint. Again Henry found another source of revenue. For 
the good of the State and the repression of turbulence, sundry enactments 
had forbidden, with very little success, the practices called Maintenance 
and Livery, by which great magnates supported large numbers of retainers. 
The statutes were enforced and the breaches of them penalised by heavy 
fines. Thus was turbulence of every kind turned to account by the royal 
treasury. 

The royal justice had failed in the past because the power of local 
magnates had enabled them to set at naught the ordinary ministers of the 
law, to the detriment not only of the government, but of justice in general. 




Monks and lawyers. 

[From a deed of grant to Westminster Abbey by 
Henry VI I.] 



y 




V- 1 -J* 'ft • '« 



•x9 



^■>w:flk s 



: JlLrJ^?W^\Mi 



**"* \ f • > e (» * * ****** V? '*"» 



THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH UNDER HENRY VI 

One of a series of MS. illuminations in the Library of the Inner Temple. Given by permission of the 
Master of the Bench of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. 



HENRY VII 251 

In fact the local magnates dominated the local courts. Henry found a 
new way of dealing with them by procuring statutory confirmation of 
powers occasionally exerted in the past by committees of the Privy Council. 
Thus a permanent judicial committee was established, bearing the name 
of the Court of Star Chamber, with powers conveyed to it by Act of Parlia- 
ment, which court could deal arbitrarily with those offenders who had no 
fear of the ordinary law or who perverted the administration of the law. 
The court was debarred from inflicting the death penalty, but its normal 
process was punishment by fines. Here again there was no tyranny; 
on the contrary the Crown, so far as forms went, had merely obtained 







Henry VII. 's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. 
[From a drawing by Herbert Railton.] 

parliamentary sanction for what had previously been done, though only 
occasionally, without parliamentary sanction at all. The hand of the 
law was very much strengthened and the royal coffers were legitimately 
filled. 

Lastly, the king resorted freely to benevolences, for once disregarding 
the letter of a statute of Richard III. But there was no compulsion. The 
king presented to his victims two dilemmas ; the first, " If you can afford to 
aid your sovereign when he is in need of money, you can bear him but 
little goodwill if you refuse it to him " ; the second, traditionally known as 
Morton's Fork — a libel on the Archbishop, who was not responsible for it 
— "You live handsomely, therefore you can afford to help the king out 



252 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

of your abundance ; or else, you live sparingly, therefore you have wealth 
laid by and can afford to help the king out of your savings." But these 
dubious methods of raising money were during the earlier part of Henry's 
reign applied not to the commons but to the nobles. It was only in the 
later years, when the king's position was already 
secured, that the machinery of extortion was brought 
to bear upon the commons. 

In the later years of Henry's reign, parliaments 
were as rare as they had at first been frequent, 
because the king had accumulated such a mass of 
treasure that he had no need to appeal to his subjects 
for assistance. He left to his son a full treasury, 
an indisputable title to the throne, and experienced 
officials who thoroughly understood their business, but 
had neither the will nor the power to control the 
Crown. His chosen agents had always been ecclesi- 
astics, or, if laymen, not lords but commoners. His 
policy had finally destroyed the once dangerously 
excessive accumulation of power and wealth in the 
hands of a few great families ; the vast estates 
were dispersed, while the gentry of moderate estate 
had been multiplied ; and at the same time the 
burgess class had been carefully fostered and their 
wealth also increased. Both these classes had 
everything to gain by the maintenance of peace, 
order, and law ; which it was no less in the in- 

A gfentleman of the time of , , <■ ,1 /-, , «.!.„. 

Henry vii. terests of the Crown to preserve. 10 the gentry 

and to the burgesses, arbitrary treatment of the 
magnates was rather welcome than otherwise so long as they were not 
themselves victimised ; and thus the Crown was established in a position 
of greater power, provided that power were judiciously exercised, than 
it had known since the days of Edward I. 




IV 



THE COMMERCIAL AND AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION 



The Tudor period saw the beginnings of that commercial expansion 
which was to make the people of England the wealthiest in the world. 
Hitherto she had not been distinguished by commercial enterprise. She 
had prospered largely because, since the time of the Conquest, she had 
never been devastated by a foreign invader, and, since the anarchy of 



HENRY VII 253 

Stephen, she had been free from the destruction wrought by private wars 
between the nobles — an immunity to which Europe offered no parallel. 
For short periods in the reign of John, of Henry III., of Edward II., of 
Richard II., and of Henry IV., she had been troubled by civil conflicts ; but 
in none of these, nor even in the War of the Roses, had such havoc been 
wrought as had been suffered by every district on the Continent at the 
hands of foreign invaders or of warring factions. English commerce had 
indeed progressed during the last two centuries ; but the Netherlanders, 
the Venetians, the great maritime cities of Italy and the great trading cities 
of Germany were, commercially speaking, much more con- 
spicuous than England. In maritime activity she was 
excelled by many rivals, although for military purposes the 
fleets of her coast towns held their own in the narrow seas. 

The great Change came, though not immediately, as a 
consequence of the enterprise of other peoples. England 
reaped where she had not sown. A Genoese sailor in the 
service of Spain discovered America when he was looking 
for India, and the Portuguese discovered the ocean route 
to the Far East, hitherto cut off from the Western world 
by the Mohammedan rampart in Asia. The sea, hitherto 
regarded as a barrier, shutting out the foreigner indeed 
but shutting the nation in upon itself, was turned into a 
vast highway where English sailors above all learnt to find 
a new field' for enterprise. But at the outset the prizes 
went to Portugal and Spain. 

This was in some sort an accident as far as Spain was 
concerned, for it is not impossible that Columbus would 
have sailed from England instead of Spain but for the fact 
that his brother Bartholomew, sent to entreat assistance 
from Henry VII., was captured by pirates, and the great 
Genoese made his bargain with Isabella of Castile instead. A 15th century wool 
And even so, England was only just behind. The energy 
of Bristol merchants had already sent expeditions in un- 
successful search for new lands across the Atlantic when Columbus sailed ; 
and it was an English expedition, though one under the command of 
the Genoese or Venetian captains, John and Sebastian Cabot, which 
first touched the American mainland — five years after Columbus dis- 
covered the West Indies and a year before Vasco da Gama reached India 
by the Cape route. But Spain had struck upon a region conspicuously 
productive ; whereas the English discoveries in the Far North seemed 
altogether unpromising. Henry, interested at first, refused to be drawn 
into heavy and extremely speculative expenditure. English exploration was 
not pushed, and no serious protest was made when Pope Alexander VI. 
drew a line from North to South down the map of the world, and pronounced 




merchant. 
[From a brass.] 



254 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

that all which might be discovered on one side of that line belonged to 
Spain and everything on the other side of the line to Portugal. So in the 
course of less than half a century, Portugal set up a maritime empire in 
the East and Spain established her American empire in the West without 
interference from England. England's own oceanic expansion did not 
set in till the reign of Elizabeth. 

But if England lagged behind at the beginning of that race in which she 
was ultimately to distance all competitors, it was not because her king 
underrated the value of commerce. Henry was not in advance of the 
economic theories of his day, but more than any of his predecessors he 
realised the importance of increasing the wealth of the country over which 
he ruled ; and he made it the direct aim of his policy to increase that 
wealth ; treating commercial development as an end in itself, an object of 
State policy, but also applying commerce and commercial regulations as a 
means to obtaining political ends. There are those who believe that a 
policy of " protection " is always right, that the home producer should be 
artificially aided in competition with the foreigner. There are those who 
believe that protection is always wrong, and that the best aggregate results 
are obtained by absolutely unfettered competition. But it is common ground 
that the strongest case for protection arises in those countries whose 
industries are endeavouring to enter a field of which other competitors are 
already in possession. This was England's case. At the close of the 
Middle Ages no one had challenged the doctrines of protection ; it was 
assumed that the foreign competitor should be shut out, or admitted only 
in return for reciprocal privileges. Henry made it a special object of his 
diplomacy to obtain privileges from foreign Powers and to reduce to a 
minimum the privileges enjoyed in England by foreign mercantile corpora- 
tions. Monopolies hitherto enjoyed by the Hanseatic League were broken 
through, the Hanse towns were forced to admit English traders, and the 
Hanse merchants in England found their own privileges practically 
curtailed. 

But it was not merely to obtain or to extend commercial privileges 
that Henry employed this instrument. When Burgundy gave shelter 
to a pretender or threatened to be politically troublesome, Henry fought 
a commercial war with decisive success. The trade between England 
and Flanders was practically stopped, to the heavy loss of the English 
wool-trade for the time being, but to the ruin of the Flemish manu- 
facturers, who suffered much as Lancashire suffered from the cotton 
famine brought about by the American Civil War in the reign of Queen 
Victoria. Philip was forced to surrender, and the treaty called the Inter- 
cursus Magnus for a while established something very like free trade 
between England and the Netherlands. At a later stage, when Philip 
again seemed likely to be troublesome, and accident forced him ashore 
in England when he was on his way to Spain, Henry extorted from 
him a new treaty of an altogether one-sided character, which had 



HENRY VII 255 

subsequently to betsodified when it became obvious that the commercial 
ruin of Flanders would mean the loss of a valuable market for English 
goods. 

A conspicuous feature of Henry's economic policy was the revival 
of Richard II.'s Navigation Act. As before, however, the object was not 
so much the commercial one of capturing the carrying trade as that of 
developing the English marine for military purposes. Although Henry 
did not create a royal navy, he was alive to the increasing importance 
of fleets when England's political horizon 
ceased to be practically bounded by France. 
English shipping had so far developed that 
the renewed Acts were not, like the old 
ones, absolutely a dead letter. Although 
the Navigation Act was to some extent a 
check upon commerce, it increased the 
amount of English shipping and the number 
of seafaring men, and thereby gave an im- 
pulse to the development of English sea- 
manship. Yet even in the sixteenth century 
such statesmen as Wolsey and Lord Bur- 
leigh were inclined to regard the Act as 
tending indirectly to defeat the end to which 
it was directly aimed. 

Henry's commercial policy was a symp- 
tom as well as a cause of the development 
of commercial enterprise during his reign. 
A new spirit was abroad, which was ex- 
emplified by those " adventures " of the Bristol merchants to which 
reference has already been made. The companies of Merchant Adventurers 
were pushing themselves everywhere, without as well as with the direct 
countenance of the State, thrusting into new markets by illegitimate 
methods if legitimate means were wanting ; their ships were seen in the 
Baltic and the Mediterranean. 

Commercialism was responsible for another change of which the im- 
mediate effects were anything but beneficial. Almost throughout the Middle 
Ages farming had been carried on for subsistence, with very little idea 
of accumulating profit. But the commercial spirit attacked the land- 
owners, who began to seek to make the maximum of profit out of the land. 
Accident had turned them to the extension of sheep-farming when it 
was not worth while to restore to tillage lands which had fallen out of 
cultivation owing to the Black Death. But when landowners began to 
seek for profit, and realised that their sheep-runs were paying them much 
better than their arable land, and that there was an immense market 
for wool which cost little to produce, they began to turn themselves 
to the actual conversion of tillage into pasture. 




Agricultural labourers. 
[Early 16th century woodcuts.] 



256 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

So began the great process of enclosing, which was twofold. It meant 
in the first place the legal or illegal appropriation and enclosing of common 
lands, and in the second place the enclosure of the open fields. It will be 
remembered that under the old system the cultivated land of which each 
village and manor-house was the centre consisted of open fields cut up into 
strips of an acre or half an acre, separated not by hedges but by balks, 
ridges which were left unploughed. The villein with thirty acres probably 
had thirty strips none of which were contiguous, although there was a 
tendency for the lord of the manor to consolidate the demesne lands. 
The tendency now was for the lord to endeavour to evict the occupiers of 
strips lying within the demesne lands, in order to complete the consolida- 
tion and to provide large enclosed fields for grazing instead of narrow un- 
enclosed strips which could not be put under sheep. The enclosure of 




A Common or Open Field in Somerset showing Balks. 
[From a photograph by Miss E. M. Leonard.] 

commons deprived the peasants of the ground on which they had kept 
their little supply of live stock. The evictions when they could be carried 
out with any colour of law, turned the occupiers adrift. The conversion of 
arable into pasture meant that few labourers were required where many 
had been employed before. Thus great numbers of labourers found them- 
selves without employment ; and the diminution of tillage, the reduced 
production of food-stuffs, raised the price of food. Hence the country 
began to swarm with men for whom there was no employment, since the 
former agricultural labourer could not betake himself to the urban indus- 
tries, which sought rigorously to exclude new-comers. By the middle of 
the reign of Henry VII., as we may learn from Sir Thomas More's Utopia, 
the swarms of sturdy vagabonds who might be willing enough to work but 
could get no work to do were already becoming a serious pest, and for 
more than half a century the evil was continuously on the increase. 



HENRY VII 257 



V 

IRELAND 

Ireland claimed its share of attention from the new monarchy. In 
the old days it had been an outlying dominion of the Crown, practically 
remote from England, and playing no part in England itself. Since the 
failure of Edward Bruce to convert it into a kingdom for himself, it had 
been difficult enough to provide Ireland with any semblance of a govern- 
ment ; but sheer incapacity for co-operation on the part of its chiefs, 
whether Celts or Normans, destroyed any prospect of its seeking to achieve 
independence. Within the Pale, English law and institutions modelled on 
those of England prevailed. Outside the Pale, the Fitzgeralds or Geral- 
dines of Kildare and Desmond, the Butlers of Ormond, and the Burkes who 
had been De Burghs, went their own way in the south and west, while 
MacNeills, O'Donnells and O'Connors did likewise in the north. Edward III. 
had sent his son Lionel of Clarence as Lieutenant ; his rule was sig- 
nalised by the Statute of Kilkenny, a desperate attempt to stop the pro- 
cess by which the Normans were becoming increasingly Celticised. The 
fusion of the races by intermarriage, and the adoption of Celtic customs 
and language, were prohibited on the hypothesis that the Irish were an 
inferior and irlcurably barbarian people ; nevertheless, things went on very 
much as before. 

No English king except Richard II. visited Ireland in person. Richard 
of York, his uncle Edmund Mortimer, and his grandfather Roger, all served 
as Lieutenants of Ireland, whither they were sent in part at least to keep 
them out of the way. But all had made themselves popular, with the result 
that, in the 'War of the Roses, Ireland provided a safe refuge for Yorkists 
and a base for Yorkist pretenders in the reign of Henry VII. ; although the 
rivalry between Geraldines and Butlers kept the house of Ormond on the 
Lancastrian side. By this time the post of Lieutenant had become an honor- 
ary one. Prince Henry, afterwards Henry VIII., was named Lieutenant at 
the age of three. But the functions were discharged by a Deputy. 

The Deputy appointed by Edward IV. had been the great Earl of Kildare, 
Gerald Fitzgerald, whose relations with Henry VII. were unique. The ablest 
as well as the most powerful of the Irish lords, he was a man who could 
himself rule but had no idea of being ruled by anybody else. The King of 
England thoroughly appreciated his qualities, and despite his turbulence and 
insubordination, even his notorious complicity in rebellion, retained him in 
the office of Deputy except when some peculiarly outrageous proceeding 
necessitated his temporary removal. Henry's attitude is exemplified in an 
anecdote. " All Ireland," complained a victimised bishop, " cannot rule this 
man." " Then," quoth the king, " I see this man must rule all Ireland." 

R 



258 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

But in one of the intervals when Kildare was deposed, Henry found an 
efficient English Deputy in the person of Sir Edward Poynings, a good 
soldier and an able administrator, who in his brief term of office established 







Ireland under the Tudors. 



the foundations of a permanent organised government by Poynings' Law, 
which remained its basis for nearly three hundred years. In England, 
according to existing practice, legislation was initiated by the ministers of 
the Crown, though it might be on the petition of the commons, and though 
it required the assent of parliament. Theoretically the system under 



HENRY VII 259 

Poynings' Law did not greatly deviate for Ireland from this practice, but 
the effect was very different. The Irish parliament did not on its own ac- 
count pass Bills which were sent up for the royal assent ; it could only accept 
or reject without modification Bills which were shaped by the King in 
Council in England. Since the King's Council looked upon Irish affairs with 
English eyes, this meant practically that Irish legislation was controlled by 
English ideas, which were not less pronounced because they were formed 
in almost total ignorance of Irish conditions. But the great problem for 
Ireland was not that of legislation but of efficient administration. On the 
whole, Henry himself aimed at the principle of endeavouring to induce the 
Irish magnates to range themselves on the side of law and order and central- 
ised government ; a policy to which the only alternative was the establish- 
ment of a military government emphatically and manifestly capable of 
enforcing law and order by the strong hand. It was unfortunate that the 
Tudor governments perpetually vacillated between these two policies, and 
while they generally leaned to the latter, persistently refused to provide the 
Deputies with sufficient military force to give it effect. 



VI 

i SCOTLAND 

We left James III. of Scotland at the moment when he had triumphed 
over the baronial factions headed by his brother the Duke of Albany. 
James, however, lacked the capacity for securing his position. Precisely 
how or why the new antagonism was aroused is not very clear ; but 
in 1488 there was a new "band" among the most powerful of the 
nobles, headed by Angus, popularly known as Archibald Bell-the-Cat be- 
cause he had announced his intention of " belling the cat " in accordance 
with the well-known fable. In the face of this combination James himself 
withdrew to the North, where he was sure of support. The insurgents, 
however, captured the person of Prince James, the heir-apparent, who 
allowed himself to be used as a figurehead, he being then a boy of 
fourteen. Angus in the past had held treasonable correspondence with 
England, though the insurgents now made anglicising tendencies one of 
their charges against King James. A battle was fought at Sauchie Burn, 
not far from Stirling, where the royalist force was routed. The king 
escaped from the field only to be murdered on the same day, though the 
actual murderer remained unknown. 

. Young James was at once proclaimed king. His father's death pre- 
vented his title from being challenged, while the manner of it imposed upon 
the Lords the need of a particularly careful display of constitutionalism. 



2 6o THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

The result was that the newly constituted government abstained from violence, 
and could fairly claim credit for devoting itself to the general establish- 
ment of order. 

It was not long before the young king showed himself capable of 
assuming the reins of government. He was a prince of brilliant accom- 
plishments, mentally and physically vigorous, romantic and chivalrous of 
temperament, alive to the duties of a ruler, but dangerously impulsive. 
For twenty years Scotland advanced under his rule, and became a flourish- 
ing and orderly State not wholly 
negligible in European politics. That 
James was a strong king is sufficiently 
demonstrated by the absence of any 
of those great contests with baronial 
factions in which each of his three 
predecessors had been involved. 
Before he was twenty years old it is 
true that there were troubles, and that 
Angus again entered into treasonable 
relations with the King of England. 
But there was no recurrence of these 
alarms. The one serious internal con- 
flict which occupied Scotland was that 
with the Lords of the Isles, the ancient 
feud of the Western Celts with the 
supremacy of the Crown. In this con- 
test James was completely successful, 
and during the latter part of his reign 
secured not only the submission but 
the loyalty of the chieftains of the west. 
The relations of James with Eng- 
land were habitually what is called 
strained. Border raids and piratical encounters at sea provided an eternal 
cause of complaints and counter-complaints. We have seen James 
espousing the cause of Perkin Warbeck and finally settling down into 
comparatively friendly relations with Henry VII., who never wanted to 
quarrel with him. But even after his marriage with Margaret Tudor 
there were occasions when only a skilful diplomacy averted war between 
the two nations. In the different phases of his relations with Henry VII. 
James did not show himself a particularly far-sighted politician, but he did 
prove himself an efficient ruler. Similarly he proved his natural soundness 
and efficiency by great improvements in the administration of justice, and 
by careful endeavours to foster Scottish commerce. He too was moved 
by the educational spirit which was abroad, and insisted upon the education 
of his subjects at grammar schools, besides establishing a new university at 
Aberdeen and introducing the printing-press. Most notable also was his 




James III. of Scotland. 
[Taken from a painting of James and his son at Holyrood.] 






HENRY VII 261 

zeal for the creation of a navy, a project to which Robert Bruce had 
devoted attention and energy, but which had remained in abeyance since 
his day. If James had died before the battle of Flodden was fought, if he 
had not given way to the fatal impulse which brought about that great 
national disaster, he would probably have been remembered by posterity as 
the greatest royal benefactor of Scotland since the days of Bruce. But on 
that fatal field half his work was undone. That, however, is a story which 
belongs to our next chapter. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 
I 

THE CARDINAL 

In strong contrast to .Henry VII., stained, to the public eye, by the sordid 
craftiness of his later years, stood the brilliant young prince who succeeded 
him on the throne ; a goodly youth, a champion in all manly sports, of a 
notable versatility, highly accomplished, a scholar and a lover of letters, 
the whole nation acclaimed Henry with enthusiastic anticipations. His 
first actions added to his popularity since he at once struck down the 
worst agents of his father's extortion, the notorious Empson and Dudley. 
It mattered not much to the public that the actual charges on which they 
were put to death could scarcely be sustained. They met with their deserts, 
and no one inquired too curiously into the technical justification. The 
pomp and festivities of the young king's marriage with Katharine of Aragon 
encouraged the general rejoicing. 

The European monarchs also rejoiced. Ferdinand of Spain and the 
Emperor Maximilian were extremely experienced politicians, who hoped to 
find in the young monarch's warlike ambitions a means whereby they 
could use his innocence to achieve their own ends at his expense, their 
immediate object being the depression of France. There was in England 
an inclination to revive the martial glories of the past at the expense of 
France, and before long it seemed that the old schemers would have their 
way. Henry was drawn into a league, and plunged into a French war in 
1 5 12. His prize was to be the recovery of Guienne. This was the bait 
offered him by Ferdinand and Maximilian, though neither of them had the 
slightest intention of helping him to get it. 

The first expedition despatched for the attack on Guienne was a mere 
fiasco. But the failure brought to the front the minister who, in the public 
eye, was to dominate Henry's policy almost throughout the first half of his 
reign. Thomas Wolsey, the son of a grazier, or of a butcher according 
to his enemies, had been sent to Oxford at an early age ; and having dis- 
tinguished himself there, entered the household of Lord Dorset as a tutor. 
By Dorset he was brought to the notice of Bishop Fox, one of the great 

ecclesiastical ministers of Henry VII. Fox introduced him to the king, 

262 



THE FAITH 263 

When young Henry came to 



THE DEFENDER OF 

who soon discovered his unusual abilities, 
the throne Wolsey was attached to the Council, probably as the right-hand 
man of Bishop Fox, who remained the official representative of the old 
king's policy ; while the war party who hoped to carry the king with them 
was headed by the Earl of Surrey, Thomas Howard. But Henry 
had an unfailing eye for character, and he perceived in Wolsey precisely 
the man he wanted — 
a man ambitious for 
England and for him- 
self, but one whose 
birth and conditions 
precluded him from 
becoming dangerous 
to the Crown ; a man 
with an infinite grasp 
of detail and an in- 
finite capacity for 
labour, but with a 
breadth of view which 
completely removed 
him from the class 
of merely capable 
officials. Wolsey's 
conception osf policy 
appealed to the king, 
and Wolsey would re- 
lieve him of all the 
troublesome part of 
carrying it out. 

Since the war had 
been embarked upon, 
it was Wolsey's im- 
mediate policyto carry 
it through with effici- 
ency. There were to be no more fiascoes, and a vigorous campaign 
was arranged for 1513, in which the king himself took part. His zeal 
for military glory was rewarded by the capture of Terouanne and Tournai. 
But the great event of the year was the battle of Flodden. 

The relations between James IV. of Scotland and his brother-in-law 
were strained in spite of the treaties of friendship struck in the previous 
reign. There were mutual charges of piracy between English and Scottish 
sea captains ; there were quarrels about border raids ; there were squabbles 
about the alleged dower of Queen Margaret. James had always refused to 
repudiate the old alliance with France, and his fatal passion for knight 
errantry was roused by the French queen's appeal to him to strike a blow 




Cardinal Wolsey. 
[After the portrait by Holbein.] 



264 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

on English ground as her knight. The bulk of the Scottish nobility were 
always ready for a fight with the English, and Henry had hardly sailed 
for France when James crossed the Border with a great army. 

The defence of the kingdom had been left in the hands of Queen 
Katharine and Surrey. James advanced to Flodden Edge in Northumber- 
land, having secured the 
castles on his rear which 
threatened his communica- 
tions. Surrey, having 
gathered a considerable 
force, challenged the Scots 
to descend from the strong 
position they had occupied 
and fight him on the plain. 
The Scots were completely 
masters of the situation, and 
declined. Surrey, whose 
movements were masked 
by the hilly country, 
marched north towards 
Berwick, leaving the Scot- 
tish army on his left, then 
wheeled, crossed the river 
Till so as to cut off any re- 
treat of the Scots army, and 
advanced southwards again 
towards Flodden. James 
might have held his own 
ground and laughed at 
Surrey ; but in a moment 
of infatuation he chose in- 
stead to descend from his 
position and give battle. 
The conflict resolved itself 
into a furious hand-to-hand 
struggle. The wings of the 
Scottish army were broken, 
the centre was enveloped, 
the flower of the Scottish nobility were cut to pieces, and James himself 
was slain as Harold and his brothers had been slain at Senlac. The 
effective military force of Scotland was utterly ruined ; and Scotland, with 
a babe in arms for its king, was once again plunged into the miseries 
of a prolonged regency. It was fortunate for her that Surrey was quite 
unable to follow up his victory by a counter-invasion. 

Henry's successes had by no means been to the liking of Ferdinand, who 




English J Camp 



The Battle of Flodden. 
[Showing the English feint march towards Berwick.] 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 265 

saw that a continuation of the war was not unlikely to secure to the English 
king the lion's share of the spoils. Therefore he drew off Maximilian, and 
those two deserted their English ally and made peace on their own account 
with France. But Wolsey had learnt in the school of Henry VII. to pursue 
his objects by diplomacy rather than by war, and he counteracted the deser- 
tion of Ferdinand and Maxmilian by negotiating an alliance between England 
and France, regardless of the traditional sentiment of hostility between the 
two countries. His immediate intentions were frustrated, because although 
the French king, Louis XII., married the English king's younger sister, 
Mary, his consort having just died, he himself died three months after- 
wards, and was succeeded by his cousin, Francis I., who was slightly younger 
than King Henry. 

In the course of the next four years both Maximilian and Ferdinand 
died ; with the result that Charles, the grandson of both of them, succeeded 
to the entire heritage of Spain, Burgundy, and Austria, and was very 
shortly afterwards elected Emperor. Thus in 15 19 three potentates domi- 
nated the world, of whom the eldest was eight-and-twenty and the youngest 
was nineteen ; and the domination of this same trio lasted for more than five- 
and-twenty years. The skill of Wolsey's diplomacy from 1515^1519 cannot 
be appreciated without an elaboration of detail and an intricacy of explana- 
tion impossible in these pages. We must be content to say that he out- 
manoeuvred both Ferdinand and Maximilian in their own game of diplomacy, 
and encouraged the former to check the aggressions of Francis in Italy, 
while he successfully kept England out of war. The one remaining 
important factor on the Continent was the Pope, Leo X. ; and Wolsey 
succeeded in making all the Powers realise that his own diplomatic ability 
made it extremely dangerous for any of them to incur the hostility of 
England. 

The accession of Charles V. to the Empire made the rivalry between 
Charles and Francis one of the two dominant features of continental politics. 
The other was the rupture of Christendom, following upon Luther's revolt 
against the Papacy ; but this did not immediately come into play. In 1520 
Wolsey found both Charles and Francis eager to secure the English 
alliance, while it was his own object so to avoid committing himself to either, 
that England might be able to act as arbiter between them, and might 
extract her own advantage out of that position. Hence that year witnessed 
the ostentatious display of cordiality between the kings of England and France 
at the famous meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold — and also a quite 
unostentatious meeting in England between the English king and Charles. 
The meetings left the real situation practically unaltered. Henry was the 
good friend and ally of both the continental monarchs, but neither of them 
knew which he would support if they should come to blows. 

While the collision was still approaching, the immense ascendency 
which the Crown had achieved in England was demonstrated by the fall 
of the Duke of Buckingham the nobleman who stood nearest to the 



266 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Crown in virtue of his descent both from the house of Beaufort and from 
the house of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son 
of Edward III. The king can have had little enough to fear from him ; 
but he was representative of the hostile attitude of the nobility to Wolsey, 
whose arrogance was particularly insulting in their eyes. The Duke had 
used language which could be interpreted as implying treasonable senti- 
ments. He was tried by his peers and was condemned without hesitation, 
though the pretence that there was any real treason was merely ridiculous. 
It was made manifest that the peers at least were entirely subservient to the 
Crown. 

By the end of 152 1 Charles and Francis were at war in spite of all 
Wolsey's efforts. A few months later, England, as the ally of Charles, had 
declared war upon France. Wolsey in the interval had been disappointed 




Francis I. and Henry VIII. at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Picardy in 1520. 
[From a contemporary French sculpture in marble.] 

by a papal election in which he had been passed over. Eighteen months 
later there was another papal election, and Wolsey was again passed by 
in favour of the Cardinal de Medici, who took the name of Clement VII. 
On both occasions Charles had promised to use his influence in Wolsey's 
favour, and on both he conspicuously failed to do so. Wolsey himself 
had always been rather inclined to favour Francis rather than Charles, but 
had taken the course which he knew his master would prefer. But after 
the election of Pope Clement, he was probably planning for a revival of 
the French alliance. In his own day he was certainly credited with having 
been intensely set upon the acquisition of the papal crown. Possibly he 
did not realise that he was a greater power as Henry's minister than any 
pope could be ; but possibly also he was already conscious that a minister 
of Henry held office by a precarious tenure. 

In 1525 the French king met with a great disaster and fell into the 
hands of his enemies at the battle of Pavia. England had put little energy 
into the war, but Henry was anxious to take advantage of Pavia to wring 
Guienne from France. He wanted money for the purpose. The war was 




The army of Henry VIII. about 15 13. 
[From a contemporary MS. in the British Museum.] 



267 



268 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

not in the least popular in the country, and Wolsey feared that to ask 
parliament for supplies would be exceedingly risky. Instead, he resorted 
to what was called the Amicable Loan, which was nothing more or less 
than an illegal tax. Perceiving ominous signs that a storm of resentment 
was brewing, Wolsey dropped the Amicable Loan and called for a Benevo- 
lence. London met the demand by an appeal to the statute of Richard III. 
by which benevolences were declared illegal. The king saw how matters 
stood, and rose to the occasion after his own fashion. He withdrew the 
demand, claiming and receiving credit for a noble generosity, while Wolsey, 
execrated by the people, became a secret object of the royal displeasure ; 
not because of what he had done, but because of what he had failed to do. 
Wolsey tried to pacify the king's resentment by presenting him with his 
palace at Hampton Court. The king accepted the present, and the 
Cardinal's favour was outwardly unimpaired 

But the fiasco over the loan reduced the French war to an absurdity. 
Wolsey achieved his own present end, a pacification with France, which 
was to pay a heavy indemnity. The defection of England forced Charles 
to make peace. Events were steadily tending to bring England and 
France into close friendship and to isolate Charles. But Charles was left 
in a dominating position in Italy, a position alarming to the Pope ; the 
antagonism of Pope and Emperor led in 1527 to the capture and sacking 
of Rome by Charles's troops, and the Pope was held in the hollow of the 
Emperor's hand. But before we pursue the story of the reign further, we 
must examine the progress up to this period of the movement to which 
we give the name of the Reformation, which was now becoming a foremost 
factor in European politics. 



II 

THE DAWN OF THE REFORMATION 

The Reformation in one of its aspects was a part of that intellectual 
movement which is covered by such terms as the Renaissance or the 
Revival of Learning ; terms which refer primarily to the revolt of the 
human intelligence against bondage to the ex cathedra dicta of authority 
in every field. That revolt involved the right of the individual to inquire, 
to criticise, to judge, and to form conclusions, or at least to choose the 
authority to whose judgment he will submit himself. In another aspect 
it was a spiritual revolt against the interposition of any meditating agency 
between the individual human soul and its Maker. In a third aspect 
it was a moral revolt against the corruption which was born of the abuse 
of practices not in their original nature demoralising. In a fourth aspect 
it was merely another chapter in the world-long struggle between Secularism 
and Clericalism, between an organisation claiming authority in virtue 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 269 

of its guardianship of the arcana of Divine knowledge, the hidden wisdom 
of the Almighty, and the frankly human organisation of the State ; and 
in this contest the State was the aggressor, and reclaimed for itself much 
which it declared the Church to have acquired upon false pretences. But 
in all its aspects it displays one common characteristic, the rejection 
of the authority of the Holy See. A great and far-reaching reformation 
or reconstruction was possible and actually took place within the Church, 
which continued to acknowledge the papal authority; but "the Reforma- 
tion " in the technical sense means the schism between the Church which 
still clung to Rome and the diverse 
Churches and sects which separated them- 
selves from her. The Reformation for 
which the government of Henry VIII. 
was responsible had very little to do with 
any of the first three aspects ; it was with 
the fourth that the State concerned itself ; 
but it was with the other three that the 
national life was most vitally concerned. 

Although the Reformation in the 
technical sense of the term implies the 
rejection of the Roman obedience, the 
movement which culminated in the Re- 
formation had no such object in view. 
Even the theological speculations of Wiclif 
and Huss, which had prepared the way, 
were not consciously directed against the 
papacy. Emperors, kings, and princes, who 
fought against popes with the weapons of the 
flesh, did not, until the eleventh hour, chal- 
lenge the spiritual supremacy of the Roman 
pontiff. They habitually looked upon themselves as faithful sons of the 
Church, and Henry VIII. himself obtained from Pope Leo X. the com- 
plimentary title of Defender of the Faith. The man who probably did most 
to undermine the papal authority, the supreme representative of the critical 
spirit, the man of whom it was said that u he laid the egg which Luther 
hatched," Erasmus, remained to the last attached to the principle of papal 
authority. The men who in England fought hardest to reinstate the papal 
authority, after it was overthrown, had been brought up in the new school ; 
and in the early stages of their careers they had been looked upon as 
advanced reformers. The first reformers believed that reform could come 
from within, and that purification of doctrine and practice could be attained 
without shattering the organisation which had hitherto seemed inseparable 
from Christianity itself. 

Moral standards in the fifteenth century were low, and the Church did 
nothing to raise them. After the Great Schism had been brought to an 




Erasmus. 

[From a German medal of 1519. ] 



270 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

end, the papacy itself had recovered some of its prestige ; but at the close 
of the century it again sank to pitiable degradation, reaching its nadir when 
the Borgia Alexander VI. was elevated to the papal throne. No vice was 
too foul and no crime too black for the man whom Christendom acknow- 
ledged as the successor of St. Peter. Nor was the spirit of religion fostered 
by his successors, the militant politician Julius II. or the refined pagan 
Leo X. When the head is corrupt, the limbs are not likely to be healthy. 
We have no need to turn to the partisan diatribes of anti-clerical fanaticism, or 
to the inevitable exaggerations of Protestants in the hour of their persecution 

or of their victory, to realise that the 
Church was in desperate need of 
reform. We may be content, so far 
as England is concerned, to call the 
evidence of John Colet, Dean of 
St. Paul's, the founder of St. Paul's 
School, the friend of Archbishop 
Warham; of the saintly Bishop Fisher 
and of Erasmus ; the evidence of Sir 
Thomas More, who himself, like 
Fisher, died for his loyalty to the 
Church ; the evidence of Henry VII.'s 
great Archbishop Morton. The higher 
ecclesiastics, often against their will, 
were forced into politics and drawn 
away from their religious duties. 
Laxity of discipline was prevalent in 
most monastic establishments, and 
rank immorality in some of them. 
The lower clergy were uneducated, 
and their teaching was commonly a 
wretched travesty of Church doctrine. 
Gross superstitions fostered by fraudu- 
lent conjuring tricks were the vulgar substitutes for religion. The re- 
deeming fact was that the best of the clergy and the best of the laity 
were alive to the evil, and before the close of the fifteenth century were 
applying themselves to its remedy. The paralysing grip of moribund 
conventions was being challenged on all sides, and the general intellectual 
movements had received a great impulse from the revelation of the for- 
gotten literature of Greece consequent upon the dispersion of Greek 
scholarship after the fall of Constantinople. In England, characteristically 
enough, the light of the new Greek scholarship was turned first upon the 
New Testament, and the intelligent criticism of Colet and Erasmus began 
to vitalise a still orthodox interpretation of the Scriptures. A vigorous 
educational reform was fostered by the greatest of the Church dignitaries. 
Warham, the successor of Morton, Bishop Fox, and Bishop Fisher, and not 




John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. 
[After the drawing by Holbein.] 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 271 

least by Wolsey himself, the brilliant "boy bachelor," with whom indeed 
education was a passion. They founded schools and colleges, and 
set in them teachers who were enthusiasts of the New Learning ; and they 
believed that education was a panacea for all the evils from which the 
Church was suffering, which would complete a cure without impairing her 
authority, changing her doctrines, or altering her organisation. The purifi- 
cation was to be wrought by sweet reasonableness. 

But elsewhere the study of the Scriptures was generating very different 
ideas. Zwingli at Zurich was finding biblical warrant for doctrines akin to 
the heresies of Wiclif and Huss, and in the university at Wittenberg, in 
Saxony, arose Martin Luther, bringing not peace, but a sword. 



Ill 

THE EUROPEAN SCHISM 

The occasion of Martin Luther's challenge to the papacy was the desire 
of Pope Leo X. to procure funds. A method of raising funds not infre- 
quently employed had been the sale of indulgences. The theory of the 
Church was that the penitent sinner might obtain from the Church, but 
not without the mediation of the Church, absolution and pardon for his 
sins, subject to the performance of the penance imposed by the Church, 
as the expression of the sinner's penitence. The penance imposed not in- 
frequently took the form of some expenditure on behalf of the Church. 
Indulgences were in the original idea pardons granted without the imposi- 
tion of any other penance than the price of the indulgence. But unfor- 
tunately in the eyes of every one concerned, the pope, his agents, and the 
public, the sale of indulgences assumed the appearance of a simple com- 
mercial transaction whereby absolution could be bought cheaply, the 
necessity for repentance being overlooked, to the material profit of the 
papal treasury. The lay princes, who might otherwise have protested 
against the abstraction of their subjects' money by Rome, made no 
objection when they received a substantial commission on the sales. 

But to Luther the whole thing appeared a monstrous blasphemy. 
When the papal commissioners were coming to Saxony, he publicly de- 
nounced indulgences,' and persuaded the " Good " Elector of Saxony, 
Frederick, to forbid the sale in his dominions. This was in 15 17. Such 
a matter might have ended by the immediate citation and punishment 
of Luther as a heretic. But Leo had more important matters on his 
mind than the opinions of a university professor. Luther, having issued 
his challenge, realised that the theological conceptions upon which he 
-had acted, and in which he intensely believed, were incompatible with 
the recognised teaching of the Church, and were in fact closely akin to 
those for which Wiclif and Huss had been condemned as heretics. If 



272 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

he and they were right, the Church was wrong. If the Church was 
wrong, the existing system was based upon a lie. Luther resolved to 
fight at all costs for the truth as he conceived it. He proclaimed the 
truth ; but at the same time he gathered a large amount of lay support 
in all ranks from the princes of the empire downwards by challenging 
the whole system by which the States were laid under contribution for 

the benefit of the papal ex- 
chequer. 

In 15 19 young Charles V. 
became emperor. Towards the 
end of 1520, Pope Leo issued 
a Bull condemning Luther. 
Luther burnt the Bull. A Diet, 
or assembly of the Imperial 
Estates, met at Worms. Luther 
was cited to it under safe con- 
duct, to be heard in his own 
defence before the secular arm 
should enforce the will of the 
pope. In the face of the 
whole world Luther proclaimed 
his uncompromising adherence 
to the faith that was in him. 
" Here stand I. God help me. 
I can no other." The irre- 
vocable word had sounded at 
the moment when Christen- 
dom was ready to hear. Fearful lest the bold monk should be treated 
as Huss had been treated a hundred years before, Luther's friends 
kidnapped him and hid him in the forests of Thuringia. But his work 
was already more than half accomplished. Although the diet con- 
demned him and he was put to the ban of the empire — in other words 
outlawed — he carried with him an immense force of public opinion. 
From that moment Germany was divided into two camps, and the 
division was soon to spread all over Western Christendom. 

Charles himself had declared for the papacy ; so also had the King 
of England, who regarded himself as an expert theologian. But Charles 
could not afford to develop the policy of the Edict of Worms which had 
condemned Luther ; to do so would have involved Germany in civil war, 
of which his rival Francis would not have hesitated to take advantage. 
The religious question was left for the time being to take care of itself. 
A great revolt of the German peasantry, although vigorously condemned 
by Luther himself, who was a strong advocate of the civil authority, was 
inevitably attributed to the spread of the new religious doctrines, in the 
same sort of fashion as the English peasant revolt had been associated 




Martin Luther. 
[From the painting by Cranach.] 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 273 

with the teaching of Wiclif. The revolt had a reactionary effect upon 
the intellectual reformers in England, very much as the French Revolution 
exercised a reactionary influence upon English Liberalism at the end 
of the eighteenth century. But in Germany itself, Luther was in fact 
so uncompromisingly on the government side that Lutheranism was 
unshaken. At the diet of the empire held at Speier in 1526 the principle 
was accepted of leaving the several States to settle their own religious 
affairs " as each thought it could answer to God and the emperor." The 
Empire as such was not to take sides. Charles and the pope were, in fact, 
just engaging in that quarrel which 
brought about the sack of Rome by 
the imperial forces in the following year 
and practically placed Clement under 
the control of the emperor. 

With the alliance of the papacy thus 
again secured, Charles reverted to the 
policy of repressing Lutheranism, and a 
second Diet at Speier in 1529 again 
took up the attitude of the Diet of 
Worms. The Lutheran princes entered 
the Protest, which gave to the Lutheran 
party the title of Protestant, a name 
which was at first applied to all who 
accepted the^ Lutheran Confession of 
Augsburg, which was drawn up in the 
following year ; but in common parlance 
the term was presently extended to 
cover all those who rejected the Roman 
obedience, whether they were in agreement with Lutheran doctrines or 
not. The Protestants at this time felt the attitude of the anti-Lutherans 
to be so threatening, that they united themselves in the League of 
Schmalkald. A war of religion seemed on the verge of breaking out, 
but the aggression of the Turks on the East impressed responsible persons 
with the necessity for preserving a religious truce. During the sixteen 
years which passed before the death of Luther himself, there was no out- 
break of religious war in Germany. But such a war was always possible, 
and the possibility was a constant factor in the politics and diplomacy of 
the period. 

It has to be borne in mind, further, that while Luther was the head and 
front of the revolt against Rome, that revolt was following a somewhat 
different course in the schools of theology, whose headquarters were at 
Zurich and Geneva. The reformers themselves were to be divided 
info two main camps under the standards of Lutheranism and Calvinism 
when the Swiss school was dominated by John Calvin. But as yet 
divisions had not crystallised. The fundamental fact was that the ultimate 

S 




The Pope struggling with Calvin and Luther. 
[From Jaime, " Muse'e de Caricature."] 



274 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

seat of authority had been suddenly brought into dispute, while all men 
seemed to require that some ultimate authority should be established. 
The Reformation did not at this stage mean anything like the recognition 
of the right of private judgment ; but it meant that every man sought for 
the establishment of an authority which would be in agreement with his 
own private judgment. There was, in short, a common desire for a 
settlement which would have involved at least a high degree of uniformity. 
The obvious method of achieving a settlement was by means of a General 
Council of the Church ; therefore every one professed to desire the holding 

of a General Council. But no one was 
prepared to accept a Council in which 
views adverse to his own were likely to 
prevail. Each party and each potentate 
wanted to secure the predominance for 
themselves. The ultimate outcome was 
the Council of Trent, which was opened 
in 1545 and closed in 1563 ; but its 
constitution so absolutely ensured papal 
predominance that the reformers re- 
pudiated its authority from the outset, 
and it was resolved into a council of the 
papal branch of the Catholic Church, 
which condemned all who were outside 
its own pale as schismatics, arrogating to 
itself alone the title of Catholic. In spite 
of the fact that other branches of the 
Church entirely repudiated this papal 
claim, popular parlance accepted the ter- 
minology and treated the terms Papist 
and Catholic as synonymous. The his- 
torian is practically reduced to accepting the popular names of Catholic 
and Protestant ; nor is there any reason why they should be regarded as 
misleading, so long as it is clearly understood that they are used merely as 
party labels without any implication of their theological accuracy. 




The Music of the Demon. 
[A contemporary Catholic caricature of Luther.] 



IV 



THE BREACH WITH ROME 



A reformation, as we have seen, was in actual progress in England. 
The " intellectuals " found favour in high places ; the leading churchmen 
belonged to the group, and the one English layman with a European 
reputation, Sir Thomas More, was greatly sought after by the king — rather 
to his own annoyance. Moreover, the intellectualism was broad-minded, 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 275 

not self-centred ; and it strove honestly and zealously to educate the people. 
The churchmen themselves were conscious of being excessively absorbed 
in temporal affairs, and many of them were sincerely desirous of a relief 
therefrom, although Wolsey was himself a conspicuous example of the 
worldly prelate. Of the monasteries specifically, we shall have to speak 
later. The standard of clerical morals was not particularly depraved, and 
the general tendency was certainly towards the higher standards. It was 
a long time, too, since the Church had set itself to do battle with the 
secular authority. Aggressive heresy was suppressed, but with a compara- 
tive gentleness. It might, in short, 
have been fairly anticipated that 
sweet reasonableness was destined to 
triumph. 

It is no doubt probable that the 
undercurrent of Puritan zeal would 
in any case have proved too strong 
for mere liberalism ; but it was the 
action of the king himself which swept 
England into the revolution. Henry, 
after some fifteen years of married 
life with Katharine of Aragon, deter- 
mined to marry one of her maids of 
honour, Anne Boleyn. This involved 
the nullification of his marriage with 
Katharine, which again required the 
papal assent. When Henry found 
that the papal assent was refused, he 
resolved to take the law into his own 
hands, which involved the repudiation 
of the papal authority and the sub- 
stitution of that of the Crown. The 
complete subordination of the Church 
to the State was the logical corollary, and the methods by which that sub- 
ordination was carried involved a complete breach with tradition entailing 
an internal struggle which ended by ranging England on the side of 
Protestantism. 

Henry's ostensible motive for seeking what is always, though incorrectly, 
called a il divorce" from his wife, was a conscientious conviction that the 
papal dispensation which had sanctioned his marriage with his brother's 
widow was invalid — such a marriage being contrary to the moral law of 
God, as distinguished from the law of the Church, to which the dispensing 
power of the pope applied. Church law forbade, for instance, the marriage 
of- first cousins ; but no one pretended that such marriages were in them- 
selves immoral, and the pope's dispensing power was unquestioned. But 
every one recognised the marriage of a brother and sister as immoral, and 




The overthrow of the Pope by the Reformation. 
[From a drawing by Lucas Cranach, 1521.] 



276 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

no one pretended that in such a case the papal dispensation would be valid. 
Henry's contention was that marriage with a brother's widow was in the 
same category as marriage with a sister. But Henry was not content with 
the obvious remedy which should have satisfied conscience, namely, that he 
should live as a celibate instead of as a married man. He was determined 
to marry again, which he could not do unless the marriage itself were 
nullified. For re-marriage there was a very strong political reason. Of the 
children born to him by Katharine, male and female, only one had survived, 
the Princess Mary ; and the succession of a woman, even if it should be 
undisputed, as was by no means likely, would certainly be fraught with 
dangers in the future. So far statesmanship endorsed Henry's desire. But 
it is further perfectly certain that Henry was bent not merely on re-marriage, 
but on marriage to Anne Boleyn, that lady being astute enough to reject 
his advances on any other terms, although statesmanship could not 
possibly approve. 

Wolsey found that his master expected him to subordinate all other 
considerations to procuring the divorce. But Katharine was the aunt 
of the emperor, and after 1527, Pope Clement dared not incur the 
emperor's wrath by acceding to Henry's wishes. Wolsey, on the one hand, 
desired the divorce, but, on the other, he did not desire the marriage 
with Anne Boleyn ; consequently he incurred the hostility, both of the 
queen herself and of the Boleyn party. 

Now, if the case were to be settled by Clement in Rome, it was tolerably 
certain that he would not venture to give Henry the verdict he wanted. 
It was possible for Wolsey to take the responsibility upon himself, since 
by the king's desire he had been appointed papal legate, and in virtue 
thereof was the supreme ecclesiastical judge in England. But Wolsey had 
no mind to be made directly responsible, especially as there was no security 
against an appeal from his decision as legate to Clement himself. His aim 
therefore was to procure a court which he could control, but whose judg- 
ment the pope would be committed to accept. Thus the affair would be 
practically in Wolsey's hands, while the ultimate responsibility could still 
be laid on Clement. But all that he could succeed in procuring was a 
commission consisting of himself, with another legate appointed ad hoc, 
Cardinal Campeggio ; while the decision of the commission was still to 
be referred to Rome for confirmation. 

Between the emperor and the King of England, Clement's most earnest 
desire was to evade giving any decision at all. He procrastinated to the utmost 
of his power, and instructed Campeggio to do the same. Katharine was 
determined to fight to the last gasp. Although the commission was 
sanctioned early in 1528, the proceedings of the court were not opened 
until June 1529. It was manifest that popular sympathies were entirely 
on the queen's side; while the Boleyn party were doing everything they 
could to undermine Wolsey's influence with the king. Before the pro- 
ceedings could be completed, a consummation which Campeggio was 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 277 

careful to delay, Clement revoked the whole case to Rome. Charles and 
Francis came to terms and the prospect disappeared of utilising French 
pressure to counterbalance the emperor. Wolsey had failed to do what 
the king wanted, and the king struck. Campeggio had hardly embarked 




Henry VIII. 

[After a portrait generally attributed to Holbein.] 

when a summons was issued against Wolsey for acting as legate in breach 
of the Statute of Praemunire. Wolsey was deprived of all his offices, 
though at the beginning of the next year he was reinstated in the Arch- 
bishopric of York and was permitted to retire to his diocese. Some 
months later he was arrested on a charge of treason, and died at Leicester 
Abbey on the way to London. One voice only had been raised in his 



278 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

defence, when his former secretary, Thomas Cromwell, opposed in the 
House of Commons a bill which had been introduced to deprive the 
Cardinal of office for ever. 

Before Wolsey had actually fallen, his ruin was assured. Had the 
legatine court annulled the marriage with Katharine, Henry would have 
married Anne, and the cardinal would have been sacrificed to the new 
queen. If the divorce proceedings failed, Henry was determined to bring 
pressure to bear on the pope, for which Wolsey would have been a most 
inappropriate instrument. The pope was to be made to feel that he could 
not ignore the wishes of the King of England without paying a heavy 
penalty. 

An anti-papal and anti-clerical policy was likely to be popular, and 
Henry resolved to take the nation into partnership, to make it share the 
responsibility for his policy. Only twice during the twenty years of his 
reign had he called parliament ; for the next ten years, parliament was to be 
the instrument whereby the king obtained his ends. The assembly which 
met at the end of 1529 was not dissolved till its seventh year, and is variously 
known as the Seven Years or Reformation Parliament. It was not till some 
time after Wolsey's death that any one person again became prominently 
the first minister of the Crown ; but it is certain that Thomas Cromwell, 
Wolsey's former secretary, was very soon taken into the royal favour ; and 
it is probable that he at once secured the royal confidence and shaped the 
king's policy. For, though Henry chose the ends which he set before 
himself, he was not, when left to himself, skilful in his application of means. 
Whenever he went behind the cardinal's back, he failed ; and when he 
forced the cardinal to act against his own judgment, he went wrong. After 
Cromwell's death, he showed no real grip of government. Hence it may be 
assumed that throughout the decade in which he appears conspicuously as 
a strong man, he was guided by a more astute politician than himself. 

This year 1529 and its predecessors introduce to us three men, all of 
whom were to become exceedingly prominent. First in order of time 
comes Stephen Gardiner, a cleric brought up in the New Learning, who in 
1528 was employed in the negotiation with Pope Clement. In his diplo- 
matic capacity he had done something more than hint to the pope that the 
recognition of his authority in England was at stake, and that he might find 
England prepared to dispense with a pope who obstinately ignored her just 
demands. Gardiner was rewarded with the bishopric of Winchester, vacated 
by Wolsey ; possibly Henry at this time intended him to go to Canterbury 
when old Archbishop Warham should die. 

But before that time arrived Henry had discovered a man much better 
suited to serve as his instrument in the campaign which he contemplated. 
Gardiner had in the interval shown an independence and a loyalty to his 
order which hardly commended him to the king. Thomas Cranmer, on the 
other hand, was avowedly an Erastian from the outset ; that is to say, he 
always asserted the supremacy of the civil power, and the clerical duty of 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 279 

submission to the civil power ; and this was precisely the attitude desired by 
Henry for the primate of the English Church. Cranmer was a Cambridge 
scholar of considerable attainments, inclining to new ideas, impressionable, 
of a tender but adaptable conscience. An accidental conversation with 
Gardiner and Foxe, the king's almoner, caused the Cambridge divine to be 
brought to the king's notice — he had suggested that the best way of settling 
the divorce affair was to take the opinion of the European universities on 
the question of the validity of the dispensation granted by Julius. If they 
condemned it, the king's courts could settle the matter without further 
reference to the pope. The king sent for 
Cranmer, detecting in him precisely the man 
he wanted, and at once employed him on a 
series of continental missions which brought 
him much in contact with several of the 
Reformation leaders. 

The third personage was Thomas Crom- 
well, reputed to be the son of a Putney 
blacksmith, a man who had certainly spent a 
good many years in Italy and in the Low 
Countries as an adventurer, possibly as a 
soldier, certainly as a trader. On his return 
to England he added the practice of the law 
to his other pursuits. Wolsey had come 
across him, employed him on business of his 
own, and finally made him his secretary. He 
had somehow found a seat in the last parlia- 
ment, and appeared again, as we have seen, 
in the parliament of 1529. As a politician he was deeply imbued with 
the ideas crystallised in the Prince of the great Florentine, Machiavelli. 
Now he became the master-builder to whom Henry entrusted the carrying 
out of his policy. 

The first business of the parliament was, as we have seen, the attack 
upon Wolsey ; the second was an attack on some quite obvious clerical 
abuses which even the clergy themselves hardly pretended to defend. No 
further action on its part was called for till two years had passed ; but in 
the interval the king himself had struck a hard blow at the clergy. He 
called their attention to the fact that they as well as Wolsey had been guilty 
of a breach of the Act of Praemunire in recognising the cardinal's legatine 
authority. Technically the thing was true ; the authority had been granted 
and exercised at the king's desire, but without the sanction of parliament. 
He therefore invited Convocation to procure pardon for the clergy by pay- 
ing a fine of a hundred thousand pounds, which to-day would be represented 
approximately by a couple of millions. They were at the same time re- 
quired to recognise him as " Protector and only supreme head of the Church 
in England." The clergy lay absolutely at the king's mercy, and were 




-:?■ 



Thomas Cranmer. 
[After Holbein.] 



280 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

obliged to accept that objectionable title, though with the saving clause, " So 
far as the laws of Christ permit." 

Meanwhile, however, to the king's annoyance, the Universities had re- 
turned answers strictly according to their political leanings. It was quite 
impossible effectively to claim that the learning of Christendom had decided 
in favour of Henry's views. 

So parliament was set to work again. In the first place, the pope must 
be definitely threatened, and, in the second place, the clergy must be com- 
pletely brought to heel. To the former end was directed the Annates Act, 
which authorised the king to suspend the payment of what were called 
Annates to Rome. The Annates were a tax, amounting to one year's income, 
payable by each of the higher clergy on taking up an appointment. Owing 
to a misapprehension, it was universally believed till quite recently that the 
clergy themselves petitioned for the abolition of the Annates, but this has 
now been proved to be an error. 

Against the clergy was directed a petition known as the Supplication 
against the Ordinaries. This was a grand remonstrance against the legisla- 
tive powers of Convocation in ecclesiastical matters, and against the pro- 
cedure of the ecclesiastical courts. Convocation replied that they were 
themselves dealing with the questions of procedure, while the canon law 
could not conflict with the civil law. They were prepared to go so far as 
to promise that in future their ordinances should not be promulgated until 
they had received the royal assent. The king, however, was resolved that 
the independent ecclesiastical legislation should cease. The " submission 
of the clergy " was extorted from Convocation ; by which they entirely 
surrendered the right to make new canons except with the king's authority, 
while a portion or the whole of the existing canon law — the language 
employed is ambiguous — was to be submitted to a Royal Commission. The 
blow killed old Archbishop Warham, and caused the chancellor, Sir Thomas 
More, to resign, since he would not be a party to the claim of the civil 
authority to usurp a spiritual authority over the Church. 

Now at the end of 1532, Francis of France was making a display of 
friendship to England in order to bring pressure to bear on the emperor 
for his own ends. Henry felt so secure of the support of Francis that he 
privately married Anne, probably in November. There were signs of a 
weakening on the part of Clement, who wished to avoid alienating France 
as well as Henry. But French diplomacy achieved its end, Charles made 
the concessions which satisfied Francis, Clement was relieved from the fear 
of France ; and although he assented to the appointment of Cranmer as 
Archbishop of Canterbury in place of the deceased Warham, a threat was 
made public of excommunication against Henry unless he again recognised 
Katharine as his queen, which for some time past he had refused to do. 
Henry therefore was left with the alternatives of complete submission or 
point-blank defiance. 

Henry chose defiance — and vengeance. His position was decisively 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 281 

affirmed by the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the final confirmation of all 
past pronouncements and all past legislation directed against the Roman 
jurisdiction. Following this up, the new Archbishop convened a court 
to try the question of the validity of the marriage with Katharine of Aragon. 
Katharine denied the jurisdiction and refused to appear ; the court pro- 
nounced that her marriage had been invalid, that it had never at any time 
been a bar to another marriage, and that by consequence the secret 
marriage to Anne Boleyn was valid and legitimate. Cranmer's action was 
absolutely in accord with the principles which he had always professed, 



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Heading of the Papal Bull against the dissolution of Henry's marriage with Catherine. 



principles which in a layman could have excited neither surprise nor 
indignation, though the cleric who acted upon them was necessarily, in the 
eyes of nearly every member of his order, a traitor to his spiritual office. 
Convocation, however reluctantly, declared against Katharine. The pope 
did not immediately issue an excommunication, but he declared that the 
judgment cf the English court was void. Henry rejoined by confirming 
the Annates Act — the Annates themselves were not remitted, but appro- 
priated to the Crown — and the Act in Restraint of Appeals, both of which 
had been held temporarily in suspense. Early next year, Clement de- 
finitely pronounced his own judgment affirming the validity of Katharine's 
marriage. The door to reconciliation was bolted and barred. 



282 



THE AGE OF TRANSITION 



V 



THOMAS CROMWELL 

When parliament again assembled in the following year, 1534, it pro- 
ceeded to re-enact the recent anti-papal statutes and to abolish the one 
remaining tribute to Rome, known as Peter's Pence. Also it gave the 
" submission of the clergy " a statutory form and secured to the king 
what is called the conge d'e'lire, whereby the Crown nominates to all the 

higher ecclesiastical appointments 
and the chapters are graciously 
permitted to elect the Crown's 
nominees. Further, it passed an 
Act of Succession fixing the suc- 
cession on the offspring of Anne 
Boleyn, who in the previous 
September had become the mother 
of Princess Elizabeth. The void- 
ing of Katharine's marriage ipso 
facto stamped the Princess Mary 
as illegitimate. The Act author- 
ised the exaction of an oath of 
obedience, which commissioners 
were appointed to present. The 
form of the oath involved the 
acknowledgment that the marriage 
had been invalid, as well as accept- 
ance of the rule of succession. Sir 
Thomas More recognised the parliamentary right to fix the succession, 
but refused to admit that the marriage had been void. Bishop Fisher 
of Rochester took the same line, and both were sent to the Tower. 

Henry and Thomas Cromwell were both exceedingly alive to the 
necessity of obtaining every possible pronouncement in favour of their 
position, because the divorce had been extremely unpopular. It was just 
at this time that the pope's final rejoinder was received, and was answered 
by a declaration of Convocation that "the Bishop of Rome has in England 
no greater jurisdiction than any other foreign bishop." The Church was 
to repudiate the Roman authority, whether voluntarily or not, no less 
emphatically than the State. The series of statutes was rounded off by 
the " Act of the Supreme Head," which gave statutory confirmation to the 
previous declaration of Convocation. 

Not ostensibly anti-papal or anti-clerical was the Treasons Act passed 
by the same parliament in the same year. Cromwell was in fact planning, 




Thomas Cromwell. 
[From Holland's " HerSologia."] 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 283 

through constitutional forms, to make the English monarchy a despotism. 
Such division of authority between the spiritual and temporal powers as 
had previously existed was already wiped out ; the whole power was 
concentrated in the State, and the ecclesiastical supremacy was vested in 
the Crown. The Treasons Act was a new weapon for striking down all 
resistance. Treason had hitherto been, in theory at least, a matter of 
overt acts. The new statute made treason of words, and even of silence, 
which were capable of bearing a treasonable interpretation. Thenceforth 
if a charge of treason were brought it would be all but impossible to resist 
it, since it was the standing rule of the law to require not proof of guilt 
but proof of innocence. 

More and Fisher, maintaining their refusal to take the oath of 
supremacy in the prescribed form, were both beheaded for treason in the 
summer of 1535. The heads of certain monastic establishments which 
followed the lead given by More and Fisher were also put to death, and 
their houses suppressed. Thomas Cromwell's reign of terror under colour 
of the law was openly initiated when he struck down the two most admired 
Englishmen of the day, and crushed those religious houses which enjoyed 
and deserved the highest reputation in the country. 

It was in this year that Cromwell appeared unmistakably as the brain 
which directed and the hand which executed the king's policy. He was 
appointed Vicar-General ; in other words, the king delegated to him his 
own authority as supreme head of the Church. At the same time he 
became the king's foreign minister, so far as such a term could be applied, 
although his control of foreign policy was much less complete than 
Wolsey's had been. It was his primary aim in this field to unite England 
with the Lutheran princes, as Cranmer desired a religious union with the 
reformers ; but both were held in check and in effect frustrated by the 
orthodoxy of the king, who was antagonistic to all theological innovations 
unless he recognised in them some political necessity which he could 
translate for himself into terms of conscience ; a process which never 
presented any difficulty to him. Cromwell never succeeded in associating 
England with the Protestant League, and finally lost his head when his 
anxiety in that cause led him to cross his master's matrimonial tastes. 

The minister had tried to make the king a despot through constitutional 
forms and with popular support. But the first condition of a despotism in 
England was the provision of a full treasury which should make the Crown 
independent of voluntary supplies. Royal extravagance had thoroughly 
exhausted the mighty stores accumulated by Henry VII., and a new source 
of supply was needed. Cromwell found it in the immense wealth of the 
Church, as Henry VII. had found it in the wealth of the baronage. That 
wealth had always excited popular jealousy, but some decent excuse had to 
. be found for confiscation. Cromwell as vicar-general instituted a visitation 
of the monasteries. His commissioners spent three months in their investi- 
gations, collecting but hardly sifting all the evidence which told against the 



284 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

monastic establishments, and not troubling themselves about the evidence in 
their favour. The result was that they were able to present Cromwell with 
a portentous report condemning a number of the small establishments as 
hotbeds of vice, and many of the larger houses as seriously lacking in 
discipline and requiring stringent supervision. On this basis a bill was 
presented to parliament, and cheerfully accepted, which condemned the 
smaller houses en bloc, though about eight per cent, were excepted from the 
condemnation. From what remains of the evidence, there can be little 
doubt that a fair and full enquiry would have quite warranted the sup- 
pression, but the enquiry was neither fair nor full, and the picture actually 
presented, lurid and appalling, was indubitably a gross exaggeration of the 
facts. The revenues were confiscated, though some compensation was 
granted ; and the vicar-general issued, for the regulation of the greater 
houses which were as yet untouched, injunctions, of which it can only be 
said that they must have been intended to make the monastic life intoler- 
able and to drive the monasteries to a voluntary self-suppression. 

In all this there was no attack on religious doctrine, a subject on which 
men's minds were much engaged. An undercurrent of Lollardry had always 
survived official hostility. In Germany and in Switzerland doctrines were 
challenged which the Church had taught for centuries. Whither should 
men look for direction ? The preparation of an official translation of the 
Bible into English had been authorised ; but it was time for some sort of 
official pronouncement on the dogmas which were being called in question. 
This was provided in 1536 by the issue of the Ten Articles "for stablishing 
Christian quietness," drawn up nominally by the king himself and sanctioned 
both by parliament and by convocation. The Ten Articles admitted no 
innovations in doctrine, but drew a distinction between practices which 
were necessary and essential, and those which were " convenient," that is, 
required by public policy only. 

But the Articles did not " establish Christian quietness." The disturb- 
ance and alarm created in the people's minds by the whole course of 
recent events could not be stilled by a mere declaration in favour of ortho- 
doxy. In the north especially the dispersed monks found sympathetic 
listeners. The monasteries had been popular landlords, and the poorest 
classes of the community owed much to them as the only professionally 
charitable institutions in the country. An insurrection broke out in Lin- 
colnshire which was sharply suppressed, but was followed by the much 
more alarming rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. 

The leadership of the movement was laid upon Robert Aske, a lawyer 
of good family. By him it was organised with consummate ability ; a great 
force was rapidly raised and held under an admirable discipline. But it 
was Aske's one desire to insist that the agitation was absolutely constitu- 
tional, absolutely loyal, and directed only against intolerable innovations 
and against the "evil counsellors" — that is, Cromwell and the advanced 
bishops, such as Cranmer and Latimer — who were " destroying religion." 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 285 

All over the north Aske and his followers were welcomed and applauded. 
If they had marched upon London, it is not impossible that the whole 
country would have risen in their support. But when they came to the 
river Don they were met by the Duke of Norfolk at the head of a small 
force. Aske wished to avoid bloodshed ; Norfolk opened negotiations, 




England and the Lowlands of Scotland in Tudor times. 



and the insurgent leaders were tricked into a belief that their demands had 
been conceded. The government was merely playing for time, intriguing 
with the northern gentry, and secretly bringing up forces. The deluded 
insurgents dispersed, and then began to realise how they had been de- 
ceived. Against the will of Aske, some of the more headstrong spirits rose 
in arms and appealed to violence. But the government now held the 



286 



THE AGE OF TRANSITION 



military control, seized the excuse to cancel the pardon which had been 
granted, and smote the insurgents with a heavy hand — not only those who 
were responsible for the new disturbance, but those who had taken part in 
the original rising. Aske and others of the leaders were executed, and the 
same fate befell the heads of sundry abbeys and priories who were held to 
have been implicated. 

A new formulary of faith was issued, commonly known as the Bishops 9 
Book, and the English version of the Scriptures known as Matthew's Bible 
was officially authorised. But the real use of the rising to Thomas Crom- 
well was the opportunity which it gave him 
to employ charges of treasonable complicity 
for a further suppression of the monastic 
establishments in the north. Meanwhile 
other events of importance had been occur- 
ring. Anne Boleyn, like her predecessor 
on the throne, presented her husband with 
one daughter, and a second child which 
died immediately. The king tired of her, 
and fixed his favours on a lady-in-waiting, 
Jane Seymour, who was not to be tempted 
by illicit advances. Anne was unpopular, 
flighty, and exceedingly unguarded in her 
actions, besides being singularly tactless. 
Charges were brought against her of gross 
immorality ; they were proved to the satis- 
faction of a court constituted with an eye 
to the appearance of strict impartiality. It 
could be confidently asserted both of Henry 
and of Cromwell that they never brought any one to trial unless they felt 
secure of a conviction, whether they relied for that conviction on evidence or 
upon other motives in the judges. Anne was condemned ; an ecclesiastical 
court was somehow convinced that some prenuptial proceedings either on 
her part or on Henry's made her marriage to him void, and pronounced 
accordingly. Anne was executed, and the king was left with a second 
illegitimate daughter. Such was the grotesque outcome of those divorce 
proceedings which Henry's apologists justify on the ground that a male 
heir to the throne was a political necessity. 

Queen Katharine was already dead. The day after Anne was beheaded, 
Henry married Jane Seymour. A year later she bore him a son who was 
beyond all cavil the legitimate heir to the throne. Having thus done her 
duty, she was fortunate enough to die ; and the king realised with some 
reluctance that it was still advisable to multiply his legitimate offspring, 
especially as the infant was sickly. For two years to come, various 
projects were proposed for a political marriage ; which culminated in 
Cromwell's selection of Anne of Cleves, the Duke of Cleves being associated 




Queen Jane Seymour. 
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THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 287 

with the German League of Protestant Princes, though not actually a 
member thereof. 

Meanwhile Cromwell had been turning his attention in another direction. 
The country was restive under the ecclesiastical policy, and there was a 
possibility that the insurrectionary spirit might resort in desperation to an 
attempt at restoring a Yorkist dynasty. Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, 
the sister of the unlucky Earl of Warwick, had been married by Henry VII. 
to a knight named Pole, who, it should be noted, had nothing whatever to 
do with the family of De la Pole. Her eldest son was known as Lord 
Montague, and her younger son, Reginald, afterwards famous as Cardinal 
Pole, was already prominent in the. ecclesiastical world on the Continent. 
One of Edward IV. 's daughters had been married to Sir William Courtenay, 
and her son was Marquis of Exeter. Exeter and Montague were on terms 
of intimate friendship. Hence it is not surprising that Cromwell discovered 
a conspiracy. The country was sown with his spies, and he had no sort 
of difficulty in procuring what passed for evidence of verbal treason when- 
ever it suited his own convenience. Exeter and Montague were executed 
at the end of 1538. The old Countess of Salisbury was spared for the 
moment, but only for the moment. 

The Bxeter conspiracy gave Cromwell his final opportunity. An Act 
was introduced for the entire suppression of the monasteries in view of 
the manifest complicity in treason of which some had been guilty, their 
general failure to satisfy the disciplinary ideals of the vicar-general, and 
the common, absence of any sufficient reason for their continued existence. 
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the great spoliation of the Church 
was the recklessness with which the confiscated wealth was squandered. A 
fraction of the proceeds was appropriated to educational purposes, and a 
larger fraction to the defences of the southern seaboard. But the great 
bulk of the estates were given away or sold at low prices, in many cases to 
persons of burgess extraction who were eager to become enrolled among 
the landed gentry. A large new class of country gentry was thus created, 
which in the second and third generations was to become a factor of con- 
siderable political importance. Meanwhile the prominent fact was that for 
the old monastic landlords was substituted a new race in whom the com- 
mercial instinct was highly developed, men who were determined to make the 
most of their acquisitions, untrammelled by any sentimental consideration. 

The final suppression of the monasteries was the coping-stone of 
Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy ; that of his constitutional policy was the 
Royal Proclamations Act, by which parliament conferred the force of law 
upon royal proclamations issued with the assent of the Privy Council. As 
the Privy Council had long ago been transformed into an instrument of the 
Crown, to all intents and purposes the Crown now had complete control 
both of administration and of legislation, though it still remained without 
authority to impose taxation. The king was also given authority to fix the 
course of the succession by will. 



288 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Cromwell in 1539 was still supreme ; yet he had warning that the 
opposition to him personally was still powerful. He could not afford to 
identify himself too closely with the school of advanced reformers. This 
was sufficiently demonstrated by a victory of the opposite party when the 
Act of the Six Articles was passed, very emphatically re-asserting six ecclesi- 
astical doctrines which were impugned by all schools of Protestants. Mani- 
festly at great risk to themselves, Cranmer and others of the advanced 
bishops offered a strenuous resistance to the measure, though they held 
themselves bound to obey the statute when it became law. The victory 
was perhaps not so decisive as it seemed ; for although the penalties imposed 
by the Act were of a most merciless character, Henry very decidedly dis- 
countenanced any attempt at its extensive application. 

But, as a matter of fact, Cromwell had already finished the work for 
which the king wanted him. His fate, like Wolsey's, was sealed by a royal 
marriage question. His representations induced Henry to fix upon Anne of 
Cleves as his fourth wife ; there was apparent danger that the Emperor and 
the King of France were on the verge of making up their quarrels, an event 
which might bring trouble upon England, and gave the Lutheran alliance 
a new desirability. But when Anne arrived in England, she was found to 
be quite without those charms of person which she had been represented 
as possessing. Henry was disgusted with her and still more annoyed with 
his minister. So he had no sooner married the lady than he discovered 
a pre-contract which provided a sufficient excuse for nullifying the marriage. 
Precisely at this moment there came a renewed rupture between Francis 
and Charles. Henry felt that he had been doubly duped, and he turned 
upon Cromwell. The mighty minister, the most dreaded, perhaps, who had 
ever held sway in England, was suddenly arrested at the council table, 
attainted under the Treasons Act, and sent to the block. 



VI 

SCOTLAND AND IRELAND 

The story of Scotland during these years falls into two divisions, the 
period of the minority of James V., and that of his personal rule. After 
Flodden, the infant king's mother, Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII., was 
made regent. A year later she married the young Earl of Angus, who had 
just succeeded old Archibald Bell-the-Cat ; but in the meantime a powerful 
section of the lords resolved to place the regency in the hands of the Duke 
of Albany, the son of that Albany who played so active a part in the reign 
of James III. The duke, it must be observed, was to all intents and purposes 
much more of a Frenchman than a Scotsman ; but he stood next in blood 
for the succession to the two infant princes, of whom the younger, a post- 
humous child, did not long survive. Family relationships played so im- 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 289 

portant a part, and are at the same time so confusing, that it is advisable 
to grasp them clearly. 

Next to the throne, then, was John Stewart of Albany — Stuart was the 
French spelling of the name ultimately adopted by Queen Mary. Next to 
Albany stood the Hamilton Earls of Arran ; the mother of the actual 
James, Earl of Arran, was the sister of James III. Next to the Hamiltons 
themselves were the Stewarts of Lennox, the mother of the present Earl of 
Lennox being a sister of Arran. These Stewarts themselves were not of the 
royal family. The house of Albany will presently disappear ; but we shall 
find the nearness to the throne of the houses of Arran and Lennox playing 
later on an important part in various political complications. 

During the succeeding years, Albany, from the time of his arrival in 
Scotland in 15 15, nominally held the regency, and was predominant while 
actually in the country. While he was not in the country, the factions of 
Arran and Angus struggled for supremacy. There were frequent hostilities 
with England on the Borders. English diplomacy was largely engaged in 
fostering the feuds of the Scottish nobles ; Arran, with James Beaton, 
Archbishop of Glasgow, representing the party which clung to the French 
alliance and the hostile attitude towards England, while the Douglas party 
were the hope of Wolsey and Henry. There is no doubt at all that Henry 
cherished the desire of turning Scottish factions to account in order once 
more to assert the obsolete English claim to the sovereignty of Scotland. 
He appears never to have grasped the fact that while there were Scottish 
nobles who were ready to make promises and to receive gifts, a threat to 
enforce English supremacy was the one absolutely certain means of uniting 
Scotland in an attitude of defiance. 

Albany himself finally threw up the cards and left Scotland for ever in 
1524. It is curious to find Arran now leaning to the English policy, with 
Angus on the other side. Angus obtained the upper hand, and for a time 
was supreme in Scotland, while he held the young king in an extremely 
irksome tutelage which inspired him with an intense hatred towards the 
Douglases. In 1528 the king escaped from the hands of his guardians, and 
the moment he asserted himself, though he was but seventeen at the time, 
he found himself at the head of a powerful following. Men who supported 
Angus in a struggle of factions supported the king against him. Before the 
year was over the Douglases were driven out of the country. 

It was the policy of. James to ally himself with the churchmen, while 
his attitude towards the nobility was one of repression. Of the King of 
England and his designs he was with very good reason extremely suspicious ; 
and these circumstances combined to make the Crown definitely hostile to 
the progress of the Reformation. An anti-English policy in Scotland 
always meant the drawing closer of the French alliance; and in 1537 
James married the French princess Madeleine. The bride, however, did 
not long survive the marriage, and in the following year James took to wife 
Mary of Lorraine, a daughter of the house of Guise, now one of the most 

T 




Aii Irish groat of Henry VIII 
[The first Irish coin on which the harp appears.] 



290 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

powerful in France. Mary herself was a woman of great ability, and she 
soon allied herself with David Beaton, the famous cardinal, who succeeded 
to the influence which had been exercised by his kinsman the Archbishop 
of Glasgow, and developed an extreme zeal as a persecutor of heretics. 
On the other hand, the king's treatment of the nobility, directed to 
strengthening the power of the Crown, was tending to drive the latter body 
into direct antagonism with James's clerical supporters. Hence we shall 
presently find the nobility to a great extent supporting the Reformation, 
and the reforming party looking to England for support. 

In Ireland the arrangement made by Poynings did not in fact very 
greatly affect the government of the country at the time. In England, 

government worked to a certain extent 
mechanically ; that is to say, the general 
administration of justice and the ordi- 
nary enforcement of law went on as 
a matter of course, even when rival 
claimants were fighting for the crown. 
In Ireland the problem was to make 
any systematic administration work at 
all. A strong deputy like Poynings 
himself could make his hand felt and 
impress upon the great men a certain respect for authority. So also 
could a strong man of an altogether different type such as Kildare. 
But authority had to be personified in a strong ruler ; in the abstract, it 
counted for nothing. When Kildare died, his son, who was made deputy, 
proved less efficient that his eccentric but capable father ; so the Earl of 
Surrey was sent over to take the country in hand. The victor of Flodden 
had been elevated to the dukedom of Norfolk, the title held by his father 
in the reign of Richard III., and « Earl of Surrey" became the courtesy 
title of the eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk. 

Surrey, like his father, was a capable soldier, and was in frequent 
employment when larger forces were required on the Scottish borders than 
those of the Wardens of the Marches. His frank opinion was that force 
must be vigorously employed if Ireland was to be brought into order. 
But his idea of an adequate force was more than Henry was disposed to 
allow him. So the policy of governing by the sword was rejected. The 
other policy, of persuading the Irish chiefs to range themselves on the side 
of law and order, was tried. Unfortunately, their natural instincts were 
all on the other side. When Kildare was sent back as deputy, they merely 
concluded that matters were to go on as before. At last Kildare was 
summoned to England and was shut up in the Tower. A rumour reached 
Ireland that the ex-deputy had been put to death, whereupon his son, 
known to fame as Silken Thomas, raised an insurrection. There was 
much raiding and counter-raiding between loyalists and Geraldines, and 
nearly a year passed before the distinctly incompetent deputy, Skefnngton, 






THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 291 

succeeded in capturing the strong fortress of Maynooth, where the 
garrison were for the most part hanged, so that the "pardon of Maynooth " 
became a byword. Silken Thomas was persuaded to surrender, but was 
ultimately executed as he had not received definite promise of a pardon. 
His captor, Lord Leonard Grey, was made deputy, and having promptly 
proved himself much more than a match for Desmond in the south and 
O'Neill in the north, he again set out on a policy of conciliation, treating 
the English party with a very high hand. Consequently he found himself 
accused of treason, and his attainder was followed by his execution. Grey 
had failed disastrously, chiefly because of his arrogance and high-handed- 
ness. That the policy of conciliation was a sound one is the natural 
conclusion to be drawn from the rule of his successor, St. Leger. A 
combination of tact and firmness, and a shrewd appreciation of the varying 
characters of the men with whom he had to deal, enabled St. Leger to 
establish an unprecedented degree of order and peace. But the root of 
the trouble lay in the fact that successful government depended almost 
entirely on the personal character of the Deputy. A series of St. Legers 
might have solved the Irish problem for the Tudors, and have delivered 
posterity from an exceedingly perplexing heritage ; but unhappily there 
were no more St. Legers forthcoming, and trouble revived in the ensuing 
reign. 



VII 
LAST YEARS 

In the last years of the reign of Henry VIII., England's relations with 
the continental powers and with Scotland again become prominent. 
Cromwell had completely established the royal supremacy in England, 
where Henry was virtually absolute. The Church's power of resistance 
to the royal will had been completely shattered, and Henry had no inclina- 
tion to permit any extension of religious changes. He did not choose that 
Archbishop Cranmer should be hurt, and although the party led by the 
Howards and by Bishop Gardiner were on the whole predominant, they 
were not allowed to make active reprisals for their repression under 
Cromwell's regime. The Howards, indeed, seemed to have achieved a 
triumph when the king was persuaded to take for his fifth wife Catherine 
Howard, the niece of the Duke of Norfolk ; but the triumph was short- 
lived, since the new queen was very soon found guilty of gross misconduct, 
this time on quite unquestionable evidence, and was executed. Henry 
took for his sixth wife Catherine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer, a lady with 
leanings to the reformed doctrines, but endowed with a tact which enabled 
her to retain the favour of her royal spouse and so to outlive him. 

Abroad the fear of a reconciliation between Charles and Francis had 



292 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

enabled Cromwell to hurry Henry into the Cleves marriage. That was 
a danger which had now finally disappeared. Moreover, Henry was again 

free to revert to Wolsey's balancing 
policy ; that is, there was now no in- 
herent reason against a revival of amity 
with Charles, since his aunt Katharine 
had been dead for some years. More- 
over, there was no love lost between 
Henry and the Lutheran League, especi- 
ally since the Cleves fiasco ; although, 
on the other hand, there was no more 
chance of a reconciliation with the pre- 
sent pope, Paul III., than there had 
been with Clement VII. So long as 
Charles kept on good terms with his 
Protestant subjects, they would not be 
driven into the arms of Henry ; but 
there was no reason why the emperor 
should not be on good terms with 
him at the same time. 

Now the relations were strained 
between Henry and Francis ; partly 
because the French king delayed the 
payment of certain long-standing in- 
demnities due from him, and was 
somewhat ostentatiously drawing closer 
the bonds of alliance with the King of 
Scots. Border raids and public re- 
criminations continued, though England 
and Scotland were nominally at peace. 
That nice scrupulosity of honour which 
some historians have managed to attri- 
bute to Henry was illustrated by his 
approval of a scheme for the kidnapping 
of King James, who was given to private 
rambles in search of adventure ; but the 
king's council, to its credit, rejected the 
surprising proposition. A particularly 
extensive English foray, however, at 
the end of 154I; gave James warrant 
for preparing a great invasion in the 
following autumn. But the organisation 
of the Scottish army was chaotic ; its commanders were inefficient, and 
James himself was not present with it. The great force was entangled in 
the morass called Solway Moss, and was cut to pieces by a very much 




Suit of armour for righting on foot, King 

Henry VIII. 

[Tower of London.] 




The Siege of Boulogne by Henry VIII., 1544. 

[From an engraving in " Vetusta Monumenta" after a contemporary pain:ing which hung in Cowdray House. 
Midhurst, until its destruction by fire in 1793.] 



294 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

smaller body of English under the command of Wharton, the energetic 
warden of the marches. The Scots king's health had already completely 
broken down ; the blow of this great disaster killed him. A fortnight 
after the battle, as he lay on his deathbed, news was brought to him that 
his wife had borne him a daughter. " It came with a lass, and it will go 
with a lass," he said, and turned his face to the wall. His words were an 
allusion to the fact that the Stewarts had succeeded to the Scottish throne 
through a daughter of the Bruce. A week later he was dead. So pitifully 
began the tragic reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. 

But for Mary's birth, Henry might have thought the opportunity a 
fitting one for attempting to capture the Scottish crown. More wisely, 
he in fact proposed, like Edward I., to betroth the infant queen to his own 
heir-apparent, a scheme to which the one serious objection was the 
conviction of most Scots that such a union would in effect mean the 
subjection of Scotland to England. A Scots prince might have married 
an English princess with comparative approval. A number of the Scots 
lords taken prisoner at Solway Moss were released on promise of support- 
ing the king's design — promises which were as easy to break as to make. 
Cardinal Beaton and the queen-mother established their ascendency, and 
headed the irreconcilables who desired a close alliance with France to 
counteract the English influence. The treaty which Henry had actually 
proposed fully warranted the most determined nationalist opposition, 
since he had required not only the establishment of a Council of Regency 
which would have been virtually under his own control, but also the 
importation of English garrisons into Scotland. 

The open countenance given by Francis to the Scots threw. Henry 
into the arms of Charles, who was already at war with the French. In 
1543, English troops were despatched to Picardy, and a great campaign 
against France in conjunction with Charles was being planned for the 
ensuing year. Scotland was seething with intrigues, for Beaton was ex- 
ceedingly unpopular, partly because of his fierce persecution of Protestants ; 
and it was almost as easy to stir up hostility against French influence 
as against that of England. The zealots even proposed to Henry plans 
for the assassination of the cardinal ; but he gave them to understand that 
although such a design was meritorious, it was not one to which he could 
lend official countenance. It sufficed for his present purposes to keep 
the country in a state of chaos, and in the spring of 1544 a great English 
fleet sailed up the Firth of Forth. Leith was sacked, Edinburgh was 
pillaged, and the surrounding country was devastated. Then the English 
troops retired ; Henry's serious business was in France. 

Here Henry's troops were operating with success ; but he declined 
to embark on the emperor's plan of campaign, which was calculated 
entirely in the emperor's own interest. Francis negotiated separately 
with his two enemies. Henry refused to make peace except in conjunc- 
tion with his ally ; Charles, less scrupulous, made terms on his own account 




z a 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 295 

at the peace of Crepy. But Henry had taken Boulogne, and was now 
determined to fight Francis single-handed rather than abate any of the 
demands with which he had entered upon the war. Francis found en- 
couragement in a rout inflicted on the English by the Scots at Ancrum 
Moor, and prepared a great armada for the invasion of England. But 
the English fleet was too strong to be attacked, and the French fleet 
was presently broken up by an outbreak of the plague. Ancrum Moor 
did not prevent an English force from 
again spreading devastation in Scotland. 
Francis realised that England was ready 
to go on fighting until he would come 
to satisfactory terms, and peace was 
made in the summer of 1546. France 
agreed to pay up the English claims, 
and Boulogne was' to remain in Eng- 
land's hands for eight years as security. 
At the same time Henry had the satis- 
faction of learning that Cardinal Beaton 
had been duly murdered in Scotland, 
and the assassins held possession of 
the castle of St. Andrews, from which 
they could defy the punitory efforts 
of the government. 

There are certain other character- 
istics of ( the reign to which brief 
allusion must be made.- Henry had 
come to the throne with a treasury 
far better provided than any one of 
his predecessors, thanks to his father's 
peculiar economic methods. That in- 
heritance he squandered, and he sought 
for a remedy in the spoliation of the 
Church. Yet those vast spoils were 
squandered in turn. Henry took refuge in the most ruinous of all 
financial expedients, the repudiation of debt and the debasement of 
coinage. In the last few years of the reign, the actual value of the 
coins issued from the mint fell to only about a seventh of their face 
value ; that is, they contained only about that proportion of the silver 
which they were supposed to contain. Their purchasing power fell 
accordingly, a fact otherwise expressed by saying that prices rose. 
Wages did not rise in proportion, and the wage-earning population 
suffered correspondingly. Only the debased coinage as a matter of 
course remained in circulation, and foreign commercial transactions were 
plunged into ruinous disorder. The process of enclosure extended and 
increased with the redistribution of the monastic lands. Agricultural 




An arquebusier. 
[From an early 16th century MS.] 



296 



THE AGE OF TRANSITION 



depression became worse and worse, while the sturdy vagabonds increased 
and multiplied, and trade of every kind suffered. It was not till finance 
was vigorously taken in hand by the ministers of Queen Elizabeth that 
the chaos wrought by Henry was remedied and the recovery of a real 
prosperity became possible. The depreciation of the coinage, it may 
be remarked, was made the more serious when the influx of silver and 
gold from the new Spanish territorities in America began to make itself 

felt, because the increased supply of 
the precious metals lowered their 
value in exchange. Hence the 
middle years of the century were in 
many respects a period of very serious 
depression, felt perhaps more acutely 
in the sixth than in the fifth decade. 
When Cardinal Beaton was 
murdered, Henry's race was already 
almost run. He had been definitely 
authorised to fix the course of the 
succession, which was to go first to 
Edward and the heirs of his body, 
next to Mary and the heirs of her 
body, next to Elizabeth and her 
heirs, and next to the Greys, the heirs 
of Henry's youngest sister, Mary. 
This Mary, it will be remembered, 
had for a short hour been the queen 
of Louis XII. of France. She had 
then become the wife of the king's in- 
timate companion, Charles Brandon, 
Duke of Suffolk. Their daughter 
Frances married Lord Dorset, who 
afterwards became Duke of Suffolk, 
and was the mother of three 
daughters, of whom the eldest, Lady Jane Grey, was destined to be a 
nine-days' queen. Henry's will ignored the claims of the Scottish royal 
family, through his elder sister, Margaret, and also the claims of her 
daughter by her second marriage with the Earl of Angus. This daughter 
married Matthew, Earl of Lennox, so that the Lennox Stewarts of the 
next generation, of whom the eldest was the unfortunate Henry, Lord 
Darnley, stood a remote chance of succession both to the English and 
to the Scottish throne, though on distinct grounds, since Earl Matthew 
himself stood in the line of the Scottish succession, and his wife in that 
of England. 

Henry had settled not only the succession but the form of the govern- 
ment which was to take control if he died during his son's minority. He 




A pikeman. 

[From an early 16th century MS.] 



THE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 297 

had nominated the " Council of Executors " (of his will) who were to form 
this provisional government. The body was carefully selected, so that to 
all appearance the two parties, represented on the one side by Edward 
Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Henry's brother-in-law, and by Cranmer, and 
on the other by the Howards and Bishop Gardiner, should be evenly 
balanced, and the equilibrium preserved until Edward came of age. But 
at the last moment the Howards spoilt the scheme, to their own destruc- 
tion. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, 
were charged with treason. There was evidence enough of guilt under the 
very wide interpretation of treason permitted by the Treasons Act. Surrey 
was sent to the block, a doom which seems to have been by no means 
undeserved, though much unmerited sympathy has been wasted upon him 
because he was also a poet. Yet it was scarcely a condonation of technical 
treason and of a painfully deficient sense of honour that he introduced 
blank verse into England. Norfolk himself only escaped the same fate as 
his son, though he was probably innocent of any treasonable intent, by the 
happy accident of Henry's death before the hour for the duke's execution 
had arrived. 

Martin Luther was already gone ; Francis of France followed Henry 
to the grave two months afterwards. Of the great personalities who 
had dominated Europe for so long, Charles V. alone remained. 



CHAPTER XI 

IN DEEP WATERS 

I 

PROTECTOR SOMERSET 

SURREY'S conduct was probably responsible for the fact that the Howards 
and Gardiner were not finally on the Council of Executors to whom Henry 
left the management of the realm. The whole strength lay with the pro- 
gressive section, headed by the Earl of Hertford, the young king's uncle. 
Brief but energetic intriguing procured for Hertford the office of Protector 
of the Realm, while the Council distributed honours and peerages among 
themselves. The Protector became Duke of Somerset, the name by which 
he is best known. 

Somerset was a man of intellectual tastes and many admirable ideals, 
combined with a quite exceptional incapacity for adapting means to ends. 
What he wanted was usually right ; the way he set about trying to get it 
was invariably wrong. He wanted a union with Scotland. He wanted 
what hardly any one else dreamed of, a wide religious toleration. He 
wanted an advance beyond Henry's position, by the admission of doctrinal 
innovations such as Cranmer had unsuccessfully striven for during the 
last reign. He wanted to remedy agricultural depression and the evils 
of vagrancy. But in almost every case the methods he adopted tended to 
defeat his own ends. 

The immediate problem was that of Scotland, where the Anglophile 
party, the party of the Reformation, had just achieved the assassination of 
Cardinal Beaton. He had his choice between giving an active support to 
that party, which would have secured him in return their adhesion to his 
own policy of marrying the little Queen of Scots to the young King of 
England ; and, on the other hand, of leaving Mary of Lorraine's government 
to win by French help, and relying upon the inevitable reaction against 
French influence to give him his opportunity at a more convenient season. 
He could have followed the second line without alienating the Scottish re- 
formers. The course he adopted was that of allowing the regent Arran 
and the queen dowager to triumph by French assistance, and then inter- 
vening to compel Scotland at the sword's point to accept his marriage 
policy. He marched into Scotland, thereby uniting the entire nation 
against him. At Pinkie Cleugh, near Edinburgh, he inflicted a tremendous 

298 



IN DEEP WATERS 299 

and bloody defeat upon the Scots, then sacked Edinburgh, ravaged the 
country, and retired. He had made no preparations for garrisoning the 
south, and the practical effect of Pinkie was to draw closer the bond between 
Scotland and France ; whither the little queen was sent, to be brought up 
at the French court, betrothed to the French dauphin, and ultimately 
married to him. Somerset had successfully destroyed an anglicising party 
in Scotland by explicitly reasserting the English claim of sovereignty. He 
had, however, achieved a military glory which won him popularity in 
England and increased his 
already overweening self-con- 
fidence. 

Meanwhile the Council, 
within which the advanced 
party had practically silenced 
opposition, was moving to- 
wards the adoption of re- 
formed doctrines. Even 
Henry had gone some way in 
sanctioning the abolition of 
notoriously gross abuses in 
the current religious practices, 
including the destruction of 
what were called " abused 
images." The term was now 
practically extended to in- 
clude almost anything which 
might conceivably lose its 
merely symbolical meaning 
and be transformed by super- 
stition into an actual object of worship j and a crusade against such images 
was carried on which degenerated into wanton violence and irreverence. 
The injunctions issued were resisted by Gardiner, and by Bonner, Bishop 
of London, as being notoriously opposed to the wishes of the dead king, 
which the Council was bound to observe until Edward VI. should come of 
age and formulate his own policy. The remonstrances of the two bishops 
were answered by their confinement in the Fleet prison. 

When the victorious Somerset returned from Scotland, parliament met. 
The Protector's paternal benevolence was demonstrated by the repeal of a 
series of the harshest statutes of the preceding reign — the Treasons Act, the 
Six Articles Act, and with them the old Acts against the Lollards. On the 
other hand, some of the religious foundations which Henry had omitted to 
suppress were now absorbed in spite of the opposition of even the reforming 
bishops. In answer to the petition of Convocation itself, parliament sanc- 
tioned the marriage of the clergy, and the administration of the cup to the 
laity in the Sacrament of Holy Communion, both of which had been ex- 




A portrait medal of Edward VI., 1547. 
[In the British Museum.] 



300 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

pressly prohibited by the Six Articles. Further, a general pardon set the 
two recalcitrant bishops again at liberty. 

During the following year, although there was no actual introduction 
of new doctrines, the party of the advanced reformers was exceedingly 
active. On the plea of preventing unseemly controversy, preaching was 
forbidden except to licensed preachers ; but as only those were licensed 
who held, and gave vent to, extremely advanced views, the general effect was 
extremely inflammatory, and again Gardiner's opposition caused him to be 
sent to the Tower. At the same time a number of foreign Protestants, 
especially of the Swiss school, were flocking into the country, owing to 




Part of the Coronation Procession through London of Edward VI., 1547. 
[From an engraving of a contemporary painting at Cowdray House, Midhurst, destroyed in 1793.] 

their dissatisfaction with the religious compromise which Charles had de- 
creed by what was known as the Interim of Augsburg. The emperor had 
crushed the Protestant League, it must be remarked, at the battle of 
Miihlberg, but was at odds with the pope, and was at the same time endeav- 
ouring to concentrate in his own hands an effective political power over the 
empire, which was arousing the keen hostility of the princes. 

When parliament met again at the end of the year, its main business 
was the passing of the first Act of Uniformity, requiring the clergy to adopt 
a new Book of Common Prayer. This prayer-book of 1549 had been 
prepared by a commission in which Archbishop Cranmer undoubtedly had 
the strongest influence ; but it was composed upon such broad lines that 
the most advanced and the most reactionary of the bishops alike found 
themselves able to use it without violation of conscience. The Act of 



IN DEEP WATERS 301 

Uniformity was opposed, as it seems, not because the new prayer-book 
itself was objected to, but because it was imposed upon the Church by 
parliament. 

At this time trouble came upon the Protector through his brother William, 
the Lord Admiral. The admiral resented his own exclusion from a position 
of practical equality with the Protector. That he was an ambitious and 
unprincipled intriguer is beyond question. He was at last charged with 
treason, and there is no room to doubt that if he had had a fair trial he would 
have been condemned with perfect justice. But the Protector was per- 
suaded to proceed by Act of Attainder instead of by trial, and the execution 
of his brother gave his enemies a handle against him. 

Enemies he had in plenty, owing them to the combination of virtues 
and weaknesses in himself. His arrogance and autocratic bearing gave 
offence on one side and his popular sympathies on another. Half the 
Lords of the Council and half the members of parliament belonged to 
that numerous class who had profited by the distribution of monastic lands, 
and sought to make further profit by the extension of enclosures, which 
they were now carrying on with a lordly disregard of law — safely enough, 
since its administration rested in the hands of men of their own class. The 
whole of that class was roused against the Protector when he appointed a 
commission of enquiry, and based on its reports bills for remedying what 
was a manifest and flagrant evil. Parliament would have nothing to say 
to the bills, yet Somerset was apparently quite unconscious that danger 
was brewing. 

Now with the summer came two popular insurrections, one in the west 
country, the other in the eastern counties. The latter was agrarian without 
qualification ; the former was complicated by religious motives. In the 
eastern counties the monasteries had not been popular landlords ; even in 
the old days of Wat Tyler, popular indignation had been very largely 
directed against them. For this and for other reasons Protestantism found 
its stronghold among them, as did Puritanism in the following century. 
Religion had nothing to do with this insurrection, which was headed by a 
tanner, Robert Ket, and was directed entirely against illegal enclosures. 
It was avowedly a movement not to protest against the existing law, but 
to procure its enforcement. In the west, on the other hand, the agrarian 
grievance was probably at the bottom of the matter, but the existence of 
that grievance was attributed by the rural population to the suppression of 
the monasteries and the substitution for them of the new greedy lay land- 
lords. The popular sympathies were therefore wholly antagonistic to the 
reformers and the Reformation. Thus with them the introduction of the 
new prayer-book was the spark which kindled the conflagration. To the 
Cornishmen the old Latin services were familiar if unintelligible ; but their 
native tongue was still, as it seems, a Welsh dialect, and a new English 
service was unfamiliar as well as unintelligible. 

On the agrarian question the personal sympathies of the Protector were 



3 02 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

with the insurgents, and he displayed no enthusiasm in putting them down. 
The rest of the Council took a different view. The eastern rising was 
stamped out by John Dudley, who had been made Earl of Warwick when 
the Council were loading themselves with honours at the beginning of the 
reign. The western rising was crushed by Herbert and Russell. Warwick 
headed the opposition which now turned upon Somerset ; and the Protector 
found himself wholly without support among the magnates of the realm. 
He yielded, was deposed from the protectorship by parliament, and was 
deprived of a portion of his estates ; but after a brief sojourn in the Tower 
was again set at liberty. 

Meanwhile St. Leger's rule in Ireland had been brought to a close by 
his recall. There were signs of a recrudescence of disturbance due to 
various causes, and not least, perhaps, to the religious conservatism of the 
Irish, who very much more than the English were under the influence of 
the clergy. The policy of the strong hand again found favour with the 
government, and St. Leger was replaced by Sir Edward Bellingham. No 
better man perhaps could have been found to carry out a policy of stark 
justice untempered by sympathy. Bellingham established his mastery with 
complete success, but in doing so he destroyed all possibility of reverting 
successfully to a policy of conciliation. There was no chance of resisting 
the stern Deputy, but a new hatred of English domination was created ; and 
Bellingham's own death in 1549, the year of Somerset's fall, left Ireland 
without the masterful hand which could hold it in control. 



II 

JOHN DUDLEY 

It is necessary, though it is not always customary, to recognise a real 
distinction between the period of Somerset's rule and that of his successor 
in the control of the government, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who is best 
remembered by the title of Duke of Northumberland, which he subsequently 
appropriated. Somerset had in him much of the visionary. His concep- 
tion of religious toleration was far in advance of his time ; his conception 
of union with Scotland went much further than the mere union of Crowns 
which actually took place little more than half a century after his fall — it 
was rather such a union as the treaty of 1707 sought to achieve. His 
attitude on the agrarian question was more akin to that of Sir Thomas More 
than to that of any man of his own class. He made no attempt to sweep 
England suddenly out of her traditional beliefs into a zealous Calvinism. 
The prayer-book for which he was responsible carried with it the repudia- 
tion of no doctrine which was held as an article of faith by the most stub- 
born adherents of the ancient ways, nor did it carry with it the affirmation 
of anything positively abhorrent to the followers of John Calvin. There was 



IN DEEP WATERS 303 

no religious persecution in his time ; not one person was sent to the stake. 
Gardiner was placed in confinement, not on account of his religious opinions, 
but because he set himself in open opposition to the government. The 
Act of Uniformity was an order to the clergy, and did not touch the laity. 
The final acts of spoliation were at the worst the logical conclusion of the 
proceedings of the previous reign by which no layman had refused to 
profit ; nor did any layman, however orthodox, surrender one scrap of the 
booty which he had gained thereby. Unfortunately for his own reputation, 
Somerset was personally 
greedy, and set a particularly 
bad example in the appro- 
priation of what had been 
Church property to his own 
enjoyment ; but that is the 
worst that can be said of 
his ecclesiastical proceedings 
from what may be called the 
Anglican point of view. It 
was not till the time of his 
successors that the attempt 
was made to transform the 
English Church into a Cal- 
vinistic body and to impose 
Calvinistic doctrines and 
practices upon the com- 
munity— 4 -an attempt which 
waspartiallystemmed mainly 
by the persistency with which 
Cranmer acted as a drag on 
the extremists. 

The man who supplanted 
Somerset was anything but a visionary. He was clever, with that kind 
of cleverness which is happily apt to overreach itself, a politician with 
no aims except self-aggrandisement. There is no reason to suppose that 
he had any religious convictions ; at the moment when he stepped into 
Somerset's place, it seemed perfectly possible that he would lead a re- 
action. But he saw no advantage for himself in that course. Among 
the men who had 'identified themselves with the new ideas he saw 
no rivals to fear now that Somerset had fallen. Cranmer was assuredly 
not the man to challenge his leadership ; whereas reaction would mean 
the reappearance in public life and activity of the ablest ecclesiastical 
politician living, Bishop Gardiner ; and not only of Gardiner, but also of 
the old Duke of Norfolk. Warwick had no intention of relegating himself 
. to a secondary place. His policy was clear. If the Reformation was to 
go forward, the party of the future was the party which drew its inspiration 




Mummers at a feast about the middle of the 16th century. 



304 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

from Geneva. It was Warwick's business to identify himself with that 
party as its champion. 

Bishop Bonner had already for the second time been imprisoned, and 
besides his imprisonment had been deprived of his see, which was given to 
Nicholas Ridley, who was at that time the man on whom Archbishop 
Cranmer most leaned. By degrees excuse was found for treating other 
prelates of the old school in similar fashion, their sees being conferred in 
every case upon reformers of the most advanced school. It is interesting to 
observe that the grim champion of the Reformation in Scotland, John Knox, 
came very near being appointed to an English bishopric. He had been 
taken prisoner by the Scottish government when the castle of St. Andrews 
was captured, and on being released from his captivity in France, where 
he had been sent to the galleys, betook himself to England ; since it would 
have been merely courting destruction to return to Scotland, where the 
French and clerical party were now entirely predominant. 

The strength of the Swiss school made itself felt in a revision of the 
Prayer Book which took effect in 1552. The first Prayer Book had been 
so carefully vague that it was possible alike for those to make use of it who 
held the Romish doctrine of Transubstantiation or the Zwinglian doctrine 
that the Communion service is purely commemorative. In the new 
volume which was sanctioned by parliament the forms and expressions 
laid down could no longer be reconciled with adherence to the doctrine 
of Transubstantiation, although a mystical character in the Sacrament was 
still implied if not positively affirmed, while the precise nature of the 
mystery was undefined. Further than this Cranmer and Ridley would 
not go. The manifest intention was still to allow the largest possible 
latitude of interpretation short of the Roman doctrine that the substance 
of bread and wine is transformed into the substance of the Body and 
Blood of Christ by the Act of Consecration. The extreme reformers had 
to be content with the explicit rejection of the sacrificial doctrine of the 
Roman Mass, accompanied by the retention of ceremonial observances 
which many of them were inclined to stigmatise as idolatrous or tending to 
idolatry. The authorisation of the new Prayer Book was accompanied by 
a second Act of Uniformity, imposing penalties for non-compliance not 
only upon the clergy but upon laymen also. Forty-two Articles of Belief, 
which vary very slightly from the Thirty-nine Articles afterwards embodied in 
the Book of Common Prayer, were issued separately in 1553, by the royal 
authority, without express sanction of either parliament or convocation. 

In matters of religion, then, the new government did not reverse the 
policy of Somerset, but applied it with increased violence and more in 
accordance with the views of the extremists. In other respects Warwick's 
aims were directly antagonistic to those of the Protector. Somerset, in 
spite of his treatment of his brother, had been opposed to the employment 
of those weapons of arbitrary power which had been forged by Cromwell. 
Warwick's first parliament made a new Treasons and Felonies Act which 



IN DEEP WATERS 305 

included as treason, or as felony punishable by death, the gathering of 
assemblies disturbing to the public peace or aiming at the alteration of 
the law ; and brought sundry offences against members of the Council 
under the same category as similar offences against the king's person. 
The new Act was presently utilised against Somerset, who after his release 
had been readmitted to the Council. Since he exerted himself in opposition 
to the more rigorous members of the body, fears arose lest he should 
gather to his standard a moderate party which would restore him to power. 
He was arrested on the charge of compassing the death of Warwick and 
others. Since he had brought himself within the toils of the law concerning 
felonious assemblies, Warwick, who had now taken the title of Duke 
of Northumberland, made a show of magnanimity by withdrawing the 
charge of compassing his own death — which would have been exceedingly 
difficult to prove and was quite unnecessary to securing Somerset's destruc- 
tion. The former Protector was condemned on the charge of felony, 
and was executed at the beginning of 1552, amid remarkable manifestations 
of sympathy from the populace whose welfare he had sincerely at heart, 
however ineffective had been his attempts to promote it. 



Ill 
THE SUCCESSION 

Northumberland had not achieved popularity. The fact was clearly 
implied when still a new Treasons Act was introduced at the time of 
Somerset's death. The Commons were ready to restore " verbal treason " 
to the Statute book, but, with pointed reference to the evidence produced 
against Somerset, they demanded that the evidence of at least two witnesses 
should be held necessary to condemnation. The plain fact was that the 
fall of Somerset in 1549 had introduced changes of policy and a change 
of persons in the government, but no improvement at all in administration, 
while the changes of policy had not commanded popular assent. The 
national finances were in appalling disorder, the fleet which Henry VIII. 
had created was falling to pieces, and the government had been obliged 
to surrender Boulogne to France without getting the indemnities for which 
it had been held in pledge. When a new parliament met in 1553, it 
showed very little inclination to adapt itself to Northumberland's views, 
in spite of the fact that every effort had been made to pack it with satis- 
factory representatives. Northumberland's influence was indeed supreme 
with the young king ; but Edward, though of an extraordinary precocity, 
had always been extremely delicate. Northumberland knew that he 
was dying, and that he himself had not time to secure his position before 
a successor to Edward should be seated on the throne. 

The law had settled indisputably who that successor was to be. 

U 



3 o6 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Parliament had not only authorised Henry VIII. to fix the course of the 
succession by his own will ; it had also expressly ratified that course as 
he laid it down. The question of legitimacy was suspended and Mary 
was nominated the heir to Edward VI. ; failing Mary, her half-sister 
Elizabeth. After Elizabeth under the will stood Frances Grey, who was 
now Duchess of Suffolk, and her daughters. If the will were challenged, 
the question of legitimacy at once took the first place. Every adherent 
of the old religion was bound to look upon Mary as Henry's legitimate 
child. If, however, the decisions of the English Law Courts were relied 
upon, Mary and her sister were both illegitimate, and in that case it 
was manifest that the legitimate heir was Mary Stuart, not any of the 
Greys. Even on the hypothesis that Mary Stuart was barred as an alien, 
the Lennox Stewarts, being English as well as Scottish subjects, were 
not similarly barred and came before the Greys. 

Nevertheless, Northumberland conceived a desperate plan of placing 
Lady Jane Grey upon the throne as his own puppet ; to which end he 
procured her marriage to one of his sons, Guildford Dudley. Mary's 
succession was absolutely certain to mean his own ruin, since she was 
passionately attached to the Roman Church, besides having been treated 
personally with extreme harshness during his own tenure of power. As a 
substitute, Jane Grey was more likely to serve his purposes than Elizabeth. 
His plan, then, was to claim that the dying king could subvert his father's 
will and himself nominate his successor. Edward's Protestantism was as 
fervid as Mary's Romanism, and Northumberland found no great difficulty 
iii persuading him to fall in with the scheme in view of the danger to Pro- 
testantism attendant on Mary's accession. It was no such easy matter to 
persuade the Council. Its members had indeed little enough to hope from 
Mary ; Lady Jane Grey would suit most of them much better. But it was 
next to impossible to find any sort of constitutional justification for the 
scheme, which was doomed to disastrous failure unless the nation acquiesced, 
as it was exceedingly unlikely to do. Still Northumberland succeeded. 
Reluctant members of the Council suddenly realised that their lives and 
liberties would be in immediate danger unless they threw in their lot with 
Northumberland: so they gave their assent subject to the approval of 
parliament. The judges declined to draw up the necessary Letters Patent 
without parliamentary authority, until they received their orders under the 
Great Seal together with a formal pardon in case it should subsequently be 
held that they had acted illegally. The Letters were signed by members of 
the Council and others ; among them Cranmer, who refused until he was 
induced to believe that the judges had declared the whole proceedings 
to be legal, and the Secretary William Cecil, who afterwards averred 
that he had signed merely as a witness. Fifteen days later the king was 
dead. Two more days passed before the fact became known, and on the 
fourth day Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen. 

All that cunning could accomplish Northumberland had done. He alone 



IN DEEP WATERS 307 

had soldiers available ; not a member of the Council could move against 
him. He had control of the pulpits, which were perhaps the nearest 
equivalent of the time to our newspaper press, and could count on im- 
passioned appeals against the succession of a papist. For his puppet he 
had a child of sixteen, the new-made bride of a son of his own. Yet it was 
from this same child that he received the first check. When the great 
men of the realm came to her and declared to her with one consent that 
she was the lawful Queen of England, with plenty of plausible demonstra- 
tions, what could she do but believe them 
and accept, however reluctantly, the responsi- 
bilities laid upon her ? But when Nor- 
thumberland would have claimed that her 
husband should be crowned king, she flatly 
refused. Guildford Dudley might be her 
husband, but he assuredly had no right to 
the Crown of England. Northumberland 
discovered that the puppet might prove 
dangerously independent, if the path which 
he meant her to follow should be crossed 
by the path of her duty as she conceived it. 

Ominous too was the silence with which 
the Londoners received her proclamation, a 
silence broken by a voice from the crowd 
saying, u The Lady Mary hath the better 
title." Ominous, again, was the escape of 
Mary herself, who had received the news 
of her brother's death just in time to enable 
her to ride rurd out of the reach of the men 
who had been despatched to secure her 
person. Ill news poured in. The forces with which two of Dudley's 
sons went in pursuit of Mary turned against them, and the Dudleys had to 
ride for their lives. The country was rising in arms. 

The duke was in a dilemma. If he remained in London to overawe 
the Council, the whole country would declare for Mary. If he went forth 
himself to crush revolt the Council might turn against him. He chose the 
second risk as the lesser. Five days after his departure, watched in grim 
silence by the Londoners, the Council declared for Mary, proclaimed her 
queen at Paul's Cross amid general acclamations, and sent a messenger 
post-haste after Northumberland ordering him to lay down his arms. The 
message was superfluous. The traitor had realised that in spite of all his 
intrigues he stood alone, deserted. The bubble was pricked. He had 
played a gambler's throw and lost, and in the hour of defeat he showed 
himself pure craven. He threw himself on the queen's mercy ; and she 
would have spared even him in her magnanimity had she not yielded to the 
unanimous voices of her counsellors. In deference to them and to the 




Lady Jane Grey. 
[After Holbein.] 



308 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

pressure of public opinion, Northumberland himself and two of his accom- 
plices were sent to the death which they very thoroughly deserved. Lady 
Jane was sent to the Tower. Bishop Ridley, who had preached a fervid 
sermon in favour of Queen Jane, was imprisoned ; so were a very few more ; 
but the generous extension of pardons was almost without parallel. None 
could have guessed from the commencement of Mary's reign that she 
would be singled out among English monarchs to be labelled with that 
cruel title" by which posterity has known her. 

The completeness of Mary's victory is in no wise astonishing. There 
was absolutely no conceivable ground for challenging her title except the 
fact that Cranmer's ecclesiastical court had pronounced her mother's 
marriage invalid, a plea which was equally effective against the only other 
child of Henry VIII. Had there been a male claimant to the throne it might 
have been urged that there was no precedent for the occupation of the 
throne by a woman ; but every other possible claimant — Elizabeth, Mary 
Stuart, Jane Grey, even Lady Lennox — was also a woman. No one could 
pretend for an instant that Lady Jane had been put up with any object 
whatever except that of securing the ascendency of Northumberland, and 
that ascendency was already becoming intolerable. The people of England 
had acquiesced in deflections of the succession, but those changes had 
always been born of rebellions which represented a strong national opposi- 
tion to flagrant misgovernment. Here there was nothing of the kind. The 
usurpation was attempted in order to maintain a thoroughly bad government 
in power. The extreme Protestants might indeed feel that a Romanist 
restoration must be prevented at any price ; doubtless Northumberland had 
hoped that such was the dominant sentiment of the country. But the 
reformers had moved forward far in advance of popular sentiment ; the 
public at large were prepared to acquiesce in whatsoever re'igious forms 
might be imposed upon them by authority. It was the Marian persecu- 
tion itself which created in England the deep-seated hatred of " popery." 
Protestantism had rooted itself firmly in a portion, but not in the major 
portion, of the nation, which was quite prepared for a return to the position 
as it had been under the Protector or even under Henry VIII. in his last 
years ; and the nation had no reason to anticipate that the reaction would 
go further, no particular sympathy for the advanced Protestants who might 
suffer. And at the outset of Mary's reign there was every appearance that 
the national anticipations would be justified. 

IV 

MARY 

It was inevitable that there should be a reaction, but there was no 
sudden and sweeping attack. Ample time and opportunity were given for 
Protestants, lay and clerical, to leave the country if they felt themselves 



IN DEEP WATERS 309 

.too deeply committed to remain in safety ; of which not a few, including 
John Knox, took advantage. Ridley was imprisoned, not for his religions 
opinions, but for his active promotion of treason. Cranmer and Latimer 
chose to invite arrest and deserve full credit for their courage ; but they, 
who had been privy to Gardiner's imprisonment for years past, had certainly 
no ground of complaint. For the rest, Gardiner and Norfolk were of 
course released, and it was obvious that the party so long suppressed 
would now have the upper hand ; but 
there was no vindictive treatment of 
the other side. 

Anxiety, however, soon began to 
grow. The queen would marry, and 
much would depend on her choice of 
a husband. Her choice fell on her 
cousin Philip, the Prince of Spain, the 
son of the still reigning Emperor 
Charles V. The marriage was exceed- 
ingly unpopular, since men felt that 
such a union was in danger of sub- 
ordinating English to Spanish interests, 
and also of strengthening the Romanist 
reaction. How far the country was 
prepared to go was shown by the 
parliament, which formally asserted 
Mary's legitimacy and repealed the 
ecclesiastical legislation of Edward VI., 
but declined to touch Henry's legis- 
lation at all ; while the Commons 
petitioned the queen not to marry a 
foreigner. The queen's advisers, how- 
ever, including Gardiner, found her so determined on this head that they were 
obliged to content themselves by insisting on the insertion in the marriage 
treaty of every possible safeguard against the exercise of Spanish influence. 

It was not by any means only the Protestants who detested the Spanish 
marriage. Within a fortnight of the signing of the treaty an insurrection 
had broken out, headed by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which was ostensibly 
directed against the marriage. Wyatt's undoubted intention was to depose 
Mary, set Elizabeth on 'the throne, and marry her to an English nobleman, 
the young Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who was descended from 
Edward IV. Of complicity on Elizabeth's part there was no sort of proof. 
The common-sense of all such conspiracies required that the figurehead 
should be able to proclaim innocence with righteous indignation if matters 
went wrong. That rule applied to all operations involving breaches of the 
law or of what passed for international law. Elizabeth herself, Mary 
Stuart, Henry of Navarre, and Philip of Spain, nearly always managed to 




Queen Mary. 

[From a miniature painting by Luis de Vargas, 1555.] 



3 io THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

be in a position to repudiate any personal association with illegalities com-, 
mitted in their name ; and yet we can be tolerably certain that they 
generally knew precisely as much as they wished to know of what was 
going on. 

For a long moment it seemed possible that Wyatt's insurrection might 
develop into a general rebellion. The troops sent against him deserted 
with the cry "We are all English." London was in a panic, and the 
Council appeared to be at their wits' end. Mary's own masculine courage 
and audacity stemmed the tide. Wyatt, unable to cross the bridge at 
Southwark, moved up the Thames, crossed at Kingston, and so marched 
towards the city. But his long straggling column was cut in two. The 
portion which reached Ludgate was already exhausted and was overcome 
with no great difficulty, Wyatt himself being taken prisoner. Wyatt, who 
stoutly declared Elizabeth to be completely innocent, was executed; so 
were about a hundred of his followers. Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane 
Grey, was implicated, in spite of the generosity with which he had been 
treated in Northumberland's affair. He too was now deservedly executed, 
together with his hapless daughter and her husband Guildford Dudley. 
Elizabeth was sent to the Tower, but was shortly afterwards released, though 
she was held under very strict surveillance throughout the reign. 

In the summer Mary and Philip were married. The parliament which 
met between the rebellion and the marriage showed the state of public 
feeling by refusing to restore the persecuting acts directed against heresy, 
or to exclude Elizabeth from the succession ; on the other hand, the 
tendencies of the government were disclosed when those of the clergy who 
had availed themselves of the statute passed in the previous reign to take 
to themselves wives were deprived of their benefices. 

A new parliament which met in November was more complaisant. 
There was a formal reconciliation with the papacy, when the queen's 
cousin Cardinal Pole was received as legate and solemnly pronounced the 
absolution of the repentant nation. Gardiner from the pulpit confessed 
his own sin in the past ; for, indeed, he had taken an active part against 
the Pope in Henry's quarrel, although in other respects he had resisted the 
Reformation. National repentance, however, stopped short of the restora- 
tion of ecclesiastical property, and it was soon to be made clear that a part 
of the nation had in no wise repented. The reaction for the moment, 
however, was triumphant. The new parliament restored the persecuting 
Acts, and repealed the whole of Henry's anti-Roman legislation, always 
excepting his confiscations of Church lands. 

In January 1555 began the great persecution which converted the people 
of England to a passionate Protestantism. It was sanctioned by parlia- 
ment and pressed forward by the Council collectively, though not without 
opposition from some of its members. It was not encouraged by Spain, 
for Charles V. had learnt by experience that persecution is unpopular, and 
it was the policy of Spain to minimise the unpopularity of the Spanish 



IN DEEP WATERS 311 

marriage. During the first year it was probably directed largely by 
Gardiner, and throughout that period it was consistently marked by the 
selection of conspicuous victims, pointing clearly to the idea that such 
drastic action would achieve its end without any prolonged and miscellaneous 
persecution ; and it is only fair to remark that, throughout, the most 
vigorous of its agents, the restored Bishop of London, Bonner, made 
strenuous efforts to induce the victims to recant and be pardoned rather 
than to send them to the stake. 

But there is one outstanding fact which marks the Marian persecution 
apart from all other persecutions which have taken place in England, 
In every other case the pretext was political. 
In this one case there was no official pretence 
of any other purpose than the suppression 
of false doctrines. For more than two cen- 
turies afterwards, Romanism was penalised 
by English governments cruelly and some- 
times even savagely, but always on the plea 
that Romanism was a political danger— the 
plea on which Christianity itself had been 
persecuted during the first three centuries of 
the Christian era. The Marian persecution 
put forth no such plea, and for that reason 
it has been indelibly stamped on the British 
mind as the one example of a religious per- 
secution ; though to this reason must be 
added another, that it was the one persecu- 
tion in which the stake played a prominent 
part, and the stake appeals to the imagination 
more luridly than any other method of per- 
secution. The three hundred martyrs oi Mary's 
reign made an infinitely more vivid impression on the popular mind than 
all the rest of the martyrs English or Irish, Romanist or Protestant, who 
have suffered for conscience' sake ; more vivid even than the twenty thousand 
Huguenots who were slaughtered in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 

First of the martyrs was Rogers, reputed to be the author of the great 
translation of the Scriptures known as Matthew's Bible. He was followed 
by men renowned for their saintliness: Rowland Taylor of Hadley, and 
Bradford. Then came the bishops Hooper and Ferrar, and in the autumn 
Ridley and Latimer, and then the man who for more than twenty years had 
been primate of all England, Archbishop Cranmer. Him the world has 
chosen to despise. To the extreme Protestants he has appeared as a 
Laodicean, a temporiser ; those who take the high Anglican view of the 
priesthood cannot forgive the man who, holding the highest office in the 
- Anglican Church, deliberately acted on the principle that the Church is 
subordinate to the State. Cranmer alone among the martyrs gave way in 




Stephen Gardiner. 
[After Holbein.] 



3i2 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

the terrible ordeal and recanted ; but to Cranmer came the reward of the 
sinner who repents, for at the last in utter abasement of soul he repented 
and repudiated his recantation ; nor did any one of the martyrs suffer the 
last torments with a more unflinching courage. The roll of the victims in 
the first twelve months numbered about seventy, nor was there ever much 
variation in the persistence of the persecution. But after Cranmer no 
person of prominence was sent to the stake ; all were humble folk, harmless, 
with no widespread influence while they lived, whose martyrdom made a 
hundred converts for every one whom they had made in their lives. Mary 




The martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley. 
[From Foxe's " Book of Martyrs," 1563.] 

had not shrunk from the terrible duty, as she conceived it, of saving the 
souls of her people from eternal flames by destroying the bodies of a few 
in earthly fires. She lived long enough to feel, or at least to fear, that the 
sacrifice was in vain ; for instead of extirpating what she had accounted 
heresy she had ensured the victory of Protestantism. 

Save for the splendid heroism of the martyrs, the tragedy of Mary's 
reign is unrelieved. There was no relaxation of the agricultural depression, 
no mitigation of the financial chaos. France and Spain were at open war 
in 1556 ; Charles V. had just abdicated and Philip was King, Lord of the 
Spanish and Burgundian dominions, while his uncle Ferdinand held the 
Austrian possessions of the house of Hapsburg, with Hungary and Bohemia, 
and the Imperial Crown remained with the Austrian branch of the house. 



IN DEEP WATERS 313 

England was dragged into the French war, which was unpopular because it 
was the direct outcome of the Spanish marriage. Moreover England was 
in such a strait that she could put neither an effective fleet on the seas nor 
an effective army in the field. The crowning disaster came when at the 
close of 1557 Calais was besieged by the French and was forced to 
surrender in the first week of the new year. Calais, treasured by English- 
men as we treasure Gibraltar, was lost after it had been held for something 
over two centuries. Of Mary's many bitter griefs the bitterest was the loss 
of Calais. Ten months later she passed away, the most tragically pitiable 
figure among all the sovereigns who have ruled over England. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 

I 

THE QUEEN 

ELIZABETH, the daughter of Henry VIII. and of Anne Boleyn, was five-and- 
twenty years of age when she came to the throne. At that moment she 
found herself with an empty exchequer and a ruined fleet ; with a country 
engaged in the interests of Spain on a French war which could only be 
disastrous. Financial dishonesty and the debasement of the coinage had dis- 
organised trade ; agricultural depression was at its worst, having been aggra- 
vated by bad seasons. Pestilence too had been at work, and the country had 
been sickened by the religious persecution. Since the death of Cromwell, 
no statesman had emerged whom the world could recognise as an efficient 
guide and support for the young queen ; there were clever men in Queen 
Mary's council, but those whose honesty was to be relied on were not 
amongst that number. The outlook would have been black enough for a 
new king whose title to the throne was beyond cavil. It seemed still 
blacker for a girl of five-and-twenty whose title was very far indeed from 
being indisputable. 

For there was a claimant, a possible claimant, in whose favour the whole 
power of France might be exerted in conjunction with that of Scotland. 
Mary Stuart, now nearly sixteen years old, had just been married to the 
Dauphin Francis. As a matter of legitimacy she was beyond all question 
the heir of Henry VII. unless Elizabeth herself was legitimate. But Elizabeth 
could not possibly be legitimate in the eyes of any Romanist, because in the 
eyes of any Romanist Henry's marriage with Katharine was valid, and his 
marriage with Elizabeth's mother was void. Moreover, apart from the 
question of Rome, the mere fact that Mary Tudor had taken priority of 
Elizabeth without any formal act of legitimation was incompatible with the 
theory that Elizabeth was herself legitimate. In plain terms, the queen's 
title rested on the fact that she had been nominated to the succession by her 
father's will, with the express sanction of parliament ; a sufficient title as it 
proved in the eyes of the nation, but entirely futile in the eyes of legiti- 
mist upholders of divine right. For nearly thirty years of Elizabeth's 
reign, the existence of Mary Stuart and her title to the throne remained a 
cardinal factor in policy. So vital was it now that the Spanish court 

314 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 315 

assumed that if she were sane, she must recognise that the security 
of her own crown depended entirely on her retention of the goodwill to 
Spain. 

Nevertheless, to the intense indignation and disgust of the Spanish 
ambassadors, Elizabeth, with a complete disregard of the wishes of Spain, 
established an administration as capable as England had ever known, and 
followed out her own perfectly independent policy. She had her 
father's genius in the selection of ministers, and had already chosen for 
her chief counsellor a consummate administrator who was at the same time 
exceptionally shrewd and absolutely trustworthy. William Cecil was no 
idealist, but he was perhaps the most level-headed opportunist who ever 
served an English monarch. Cecil and Elizabeth saw with unerring clear- 
ness of vision that she, not Philip, was in fact mistress of the situation. 
Philip could not afford at any price to allow Mary Stuart to become Queen 
of England. For Mary was already Queen of Scotland ; she would in the 
natural course of events become Queen of France ; and if she became queen 
of England also, France, England and Scotland, united under a single 
crown, would form a power destructive to the Spanish ascendency in Europe, 
completely severing Spain from the Netherlands by sea as well as by land. 
Hence, whatever Elizabeth might do, it was absolutely imperative for Philip 
to maintain her on the English throne. She was under no necessity for 
seeking his support, since for his own sake he was bound to give it. 

On the other hand, the fact that Mary was the prospective queen 
of France gave Elizabeth additional security within her own realm. The 
nation had had a very unpleasant taste in the last reign of the effects 
of having a queen whose consort was King of Spain. If Mary Stuart, 
queen of France and Scotland, were queen of England, France would 
be the leading State in the combination, and English policy would 
inevitably be made subservient to French policy. Whatever the religious 
leanings of the majority of the population might be, two-thirds of the 
Romanists would certainly not stir a finger to set a French queen on 
the English throne. 

But it was imperatively necessary to arrive at a religious settlement 
which should give the country religious peace. Was Elizabeth to follow 
a Romanist or a Protestant policy ? She could not if she would be frankly 
Romanist, because that would involve her own admission of her own 
illegitimacy, while it would deprive her Protestant subjects of their religious 
grounds for supporting her, and might evert drive them to fall back upon 
asserting the claims of Catherine Grey, the sister of Lady Jane. Moreover, 
a Romanising policy could not stop short at a mere reversion to the 
position at the end of the reign of Henry VIII., which was what Elizabeth 
herself would certainly have chosen. Nor was that a policy which could 
have found support from the men on whom the queen knew that she 
.must rely. A Protestant settlement was the only possible solution. 

There still remained an undecided question of great importance. Whom 



316 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

should the young Queen of England marry ? All England took it for 
granted that she must marry somebody, if only in order to settle the succes- 
sion. Elizabeth herself had probably made up her mind from the outset 
that she would not marry at all, though no statesmen either at home or 
abroad ever believed that this was her real intention. She did not mean 
them to believe it. She recognised in her own unwedded state an eternal 
diplomatic lure. Until she should be married, her hand was a prize which 
could be made the subject of negotiation ; once she was married, an actual 
husband in the flesh would certainly be an incubus. And accordingly 
for five-and-twenty years of her reign she retained the possibilities of 
a marriage with herself as an invaluable diplomatic asset. 



II 
THE SETTLEMENT IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 

The first marriage proposal came from Philip of Spain himself. He 
would get a papal dispensation allowing his marriage with his deceased 
wife's half-sister. To his great astonishment, his offer was politely declined 
by the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who, if such a dispensation were valid, 
could not herself claim to have been born in wedlock. The disappointed 
suitor took another wife, a princess of France. A curious popular supersti- 
tion that he sent the Spanish Armada thirty years afterwards to punish 
Elizabeth for refusing him must be put away among the fairy tales of 
history. The matter of pressing importance to Elizabeth was to free 
herself from foreign complications for the moment. There was an 
armistice in the French war, and the treaty of Cateau Cambresis allowed 
England to retire with her honour saved by the French king's promise 
to restore Calais after eight years, supplemented by the formal recognition 
of Elizabeth as the lawful Queen of England ; while she herself evaded 
the formal recognition of Mary as heir-presumptive. 

The religious question was promptly dealt with. No changes were 
made till parliament met at the beginning of 1559. The Marian legislation 
was then reversed, and the new settlement took shape in the new Acts of 
Supremacy and Uniformity. By the former, the title of Supreme Head 
was dropped, but the Crown w 7 as declared to be " supreme in all causes 
as well ecclesiastical as civil." The refusal of the oath was not to be 
counted as treason, but was a bar to office. Religious opinions were 
to be a ground for proceedings only when they controverted decisions 
of the first four General Councils of the Church Universal, or were in 
plain contradiction to the Scriptures. The Act also authorised the appoint- 
ment of a court for dealing with ecclesiastical offences, which was actually 
constituted twenty-four years later as the Court of High Commission. 
The new Act of Uniformity required the use of a new service-book 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 317 

which differed very little from that of 1552, though in some respects 
it reverted to the less emphatically Protestant volume of 1549. Refusal 
to accept the two Acts caused the deprivation of all the bishops except one, 
and the ejection of a small number of the lower clergy from their benefices. 
The vacated sees were filled almost entirely from among the less extreme 
Protestants, Matthew Parker being made Archbishop of Canterbury. 
Critics hostile to the 
doctrine of the con- 
tinuity of the English 
Church and of the 
apostolic succession in 
its priesthood rest their 
case on doubts of the 
validity of the ordina- 
tion of Bishop Barlow, 
who consecrated Arch- 
bishop Parker — 
doubts for which the 
evidence gives no suf- 
ficient warrant. The 
principle of the settle- 
ment was approxi- 
mately that at which 
Somerset had aimed 
— the enforcement of 
a sufficient uniformity 
of practice and cere- 
monial along with the 
admission of very wide 
variations of doctrine 
but a definite rejection 
of transubstantiation. 
Methods of Church 
government and ques- 
tions of ceremonial, 
not questions of actual doctrine, were those which for the most part 
disturbed the peace of the comprehensive Church which was thus estab- 
lished. 

Financial administration was also vigorously taken in hand. Immediate 
confidence was inspired by the known probity of the financial agents 
selected by Cecil, by the obvious self-reliance with which the government 
faced its difficulties, and by its hardly expected stability. It soon became 
manifest that there was to be no wastage, and that every penny of the 
public supplies would be strictly expended on national objects under 
stringent supervision. Every loan that was negotiated was repaid with 




Queen Elizabeth. 
[From the painting attributed to Marcus Gheeraedts in the National Portrait Gallery.) 



3 i8 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

an admirable punctuality ; and with the restoration of public credit, the 
negotiation of loans became a comparatively easy matter. The financial 
problem was in great part solved by the skill with which the whole of the 
debased coinage in general circulation was called in and was replaced by 
a new coinage of which the real and the nominal values were the same. 

During the same period Scotland was also settling her own affairs, 
which were reaching a crisis at the moment of Elizabeth's accession. In 
the eleven years since Somerset's invasion in 1547, the French party had 
held the ascendency. Although the Earl of Arran, the heir-presumptive, 
who held also the French title of Duke of Chatelherault, was nominally 
regent, Mary of Lorraine was the real ruler of the country, and in 1554 
she became actually regent, Chatelherault retiring. It was in fact her 
policy to turn Scotland into a province of France — by no means with 
Scottish approval. The appointment of Frenchmen to the most responsible 
offices of the state intensified the general uneasiness. An attempt to 
establish a property tax had to be promptly abandoned, and when the 
regent in 1557 proposed to invade England in the interests of France, she 
met with an obstinate refusal from the leading nobles. In the following 
year Queen Mary was married to the Dauphin, and the Scottish com- 
missioners for the marriage treaty returned from France with an angry 
consciousness that if they had given way to the French demands, which 
they refused to do, Scotland would have ceased to be the ally and would 
have become in effect the subordinate of France. 

Now hostility to France meant of necessity inclination towards England. 
In the past it might at almost any time have been claimed that patriotism 
and hostility to England would go hand in hand ; but under the existing 
conditions patriotism came near to involving hostility to France. Moreover, 
the coming of the Reformation had introduced a new factor. The Guises in 
France were at the head of what, in that country at least, may be called 
without offence the Catholic party ; Mary of Lorraine in Scotland had 
identified herself with the Clerical party. If Protestantism triumphed in 
England, Scottish Protestantism would inevitably turn to England for 
support, as it had done a dozen years before. Scotland would in any 
circumstances refuse, as she had always refused, anything that pointed 
to subjection to the richer country, but the idea of a union which involved 
no subordination was one which now might possibly be rendered accept- 
able to the Scottish people, even as it had seemed desirable to far-seeing 
statesmen in both countries. 

During Mary Tudor's reign in England, the regent in Scotland had 
been obliged to walk warily in matters of religion, and the reformed 
doctrines had spread apace, several of the nobles ranging themselves upon 
that side ; prominent among whom were the Lord James Stuart, the young 
queen's illegitimate half-brother, and the Earls of Argyle and Morton, to 
whom was shortly to be added the Earl of Arran, a title which was now 
borne by the son of the Duke of Chatelherault, The Protestant lords, 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 319 

soon to be known as the Lords of the Congregation, were already in 1557 
assuming an aggressive attitude, which became directly defiant in the next 
year when an old man named Walter Mills was burnt for heresy. And 
before the end of that year the professed Protestant Elizabeth was on the 
throne of England. 

Before the end of May 1559 it was already certain that there would be 
an armed struggle in Scotland. In July Henry II. of France was killed in a 
tournament; his son Francis II. and Mary Stuart became king and queen. 
Both in France and Scotland the Guise interest was predominant ; and the 
Lords of the Congregation opened communications with England, while 
French troops were landed in Scotland to support the regent. 

It was at this stage that Elizabeth got fairly started on her matrimonial 
diplomacy. Philip of Spain now wished her to marry his cousin the 
Austrian Archduke Charles. The Scots 

proposed that she should marry the young (p 

Earl of Arran, whose prospective claim to )u£^E=?Mi£t 

the Scottish throne might be made an |p^_^^ \^Bm(^^^^^^)) 
immediate one by the deposition of Mary ^^^^^^^=^^^^, ^^^^^ 
Stuart. Elizabeth played with both offers, ^~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

though she had no intention of accept- ^^^Jt^nf >c|§/ i||fy 

ing either. It was her favourite method ^ 

i„ -j .,,• _ 'i_ ir j. u j Queen Elizabeth's State Carriage. 

to avoid committing herself to anybody. ^ s 

But in the next year, under persistent pressure from Cecil, she did 
commit herself to supporting the Lords of the Congregation ; not, in 
theory, against the queen, but against the regent who was abusing the royal 
authority. Elizabeth was already able to send an efficient fleet to sea, and 
the arrival of an English squadron in the Forth cut off all prospect of 
French reinforcement for the regent. This was followed up by the despatch 
of an army to help the Lords of the Congregation. The regent was shut 
up in Leith, which was vigorously defended ; but in June she died, and 
with her death the position of the French troops in Scotland became 
practically untenable. An arrangement was entered upon variously known 
as the Treaty of Edinburgh or of Leith. The French were to evacuate 
Scotland, having given a pledge that the demand of the Lords of the 
Congregation for religious toleration should be recognised, as well as 
Elizabeth's own right to the throne of England. Virtually the triumph of 
the Lords of the Congregation was secured with the death of the regent 
and the disappearance' of the French troops. It was certain that after this 
any serious attempt to bring back the French would be impracticable. 
Mary might, and did, refuse to ratify the treaty, but the fact of the evacuation 
was decisive. 

Before the end of the year, the death of Mary's husband changed the 
whole situation. She was no longer Queen of France. The queen-mother, 
Catherine de Medicis, meant to secure her own ascendency over the new 
King Charles IX., and France had no longer the same interest as before in 



3 2o THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

the possibility of Mary's accession to the English throne. The presumption 
remained that such an event would bring England into close alliance with 
France, but nothing more. There was a possibility that Philip might 
attach Mary to himself, though unless he could succeed in doing so it 
would still be emphatically opposed to his interests to see Mary on the 
English throne. Elizabeth could for the present remain free from the fear 
of Spanish intervention on Mary's behalf, and would rather make it her 
aim to attach Mary to England. The Scots of both parties saw possibilities 
of advantage for themselves in the return of the young queen to her native 
country. In August 1561 Mary left the land in which she had been bred 
and reached the bleak shores of her own northern kingdom. 



Ill 
THE CONTINENT: MARY STUART IN SCOTLAND 

For a few years to come, England itself was settling down and rapidly 
developing strength and wealth under Burleigh's administration. Mary was 
following out her own dramatic destiny in Scotland. But on the Continent 
events were taking place, the meaning of which must be grasped in order 
to make the subsequent history intelligible. 

In the first place the Council of Trent was brought to a conclusion. It 
had never been in any sense a Council of Christendom, since it had excluded 
from its deliberations so much of Christendom as challenged the spiritual 
supremacy of the papacy. But it defined Catholic doctrine from the Roman 
point of view, drawing its own ring-fence round the Church and parting 
those whom it recognised as Catholics from the rest of the world. The 
party label was accepted in common speech, but without any admission of 
the implied contention that those whom the Church of Rome chose to 
exclude were not members of the Church Catholic ; precisely as an English 
political party calls itself and is called by its opponents Liberal or Conserva- 
tive without implying its exclusive possession of the qualities expressed by 
those terms. Further, within the Roman Church there was being perfected 
that militant organisation known as the Order of the Jesuits, which played 
an extremely active part in the coming politico-religious struggle. 

Next ; in France began a series of wars of religion which continued 
into the last decade of the century. Among the nobility and the common 
people there was something like a balance between the Catholics and the 
Huguenots ; the Huguenots being headed by the Bourbon branch of the 
royal family, which stood next in succession after the four brothers of 
whom the reigning king Charles IX. was the second. At the head of the 
Catholics stood the powerful Guise family. But between the two stood a 
middle party whose main object was the political one of preventing either 
Huguenots or Guises from becoming over powerful. This was the party 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 321 

of Catherine de Medicis, who herself cared nothing for religion, but in- 
clined towards repression or toleration of the Huguenots according to the 
exigencies of political strife. These came to be known as the Politiques. 
This strife of parties prevented France from concentrating on a national 
policy. 

In the third place, Spain became involved in a long struggle with the 
Netherlands, which formed the main portion of Philip's Burgundian in- 
heritance. Here there were two factors at work. The several states which 
made up the Netherlands or 
Low Countries had in effect 
been self-governing states in the 
past ; whereas it was Philip's 
aim to subject them to Spanish 
domination, to which none of 
them were inclined to submit. 
But further, the Northern Pro- 
vinces were fervent adherents of 
the Reformation, whereas the 
Southern Provinces, roughly 
corresponding to the modern 
Belgium, remained on the 
Catholic side. Philip regarded 
the suppression of heresy as his 
own special function. The 
Northern Netherlands therefore 
had the double grievance that 
Philip's policy sought to deprive 
them both of political and of 
religious liberty ; the Southern 
States had only the political 
grievance. In 1567 the Duke 
of Alva was sent to the Nether- 
lands as governor to crush re- 
sistance in general and heresy in particular, and in 1568 the Netherlands 
broke out in open revolt. From that time the recognised hero of the 
struggle for liberty was William the Silent, of Orange and Nassau, and 
the subjugation of the Netherlands took precedence of all other objects 
in the mind of Philip of Spain. 

The dramatic interest centres entirely in Scotland. There the young 
queen on her arrival found the Lords of the Congregation completely 
dominant, while the two most powerful men in the country were the 
preacher John Knox and her own half-brother Lord James Stuart, better 
known to posterity by his later title of Earl of Moray. In Scotland there 
-was no question of a Catholic element extending toleration to Protestants ; 
the question was as to the amount of toleration which the Calvinistic 

X 




Queen Mary Stuart. 
[After the painting by Francois Clouet. ] 



322 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Protestants of the country would extend to the Catholics. A Catholic 
herself, all that Mary could do was to place herself ostensibly in Moray's 
hands, whatever hopes she may have cherished of ultimately restoring the 
ascendency of her own faith. But she was able and ambitious, and she 
had been bred in a political atmosphere. She was also beautiful, and 
endowed with an extraordinary fascination. With her as with Elizabeth, 
the great problem was to find a suitable husband, a matter which was of 
extreme interest to the French, the Spanish, and the English courts. 

Elizabeth tried hard to persuade her cousin to marry her own favourite 
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a younger son of the traitor Duke of 
Northumberland. The Queen of England had driven her own ministers 
to the verge of despair by giving colour to the suspicion that she had 
thoughts of marrying Leicester herself ; and the proposal that Mary should 
marry him was resented as insulting. Both Charles IX. of France and 
Don Carlos the heir-apparent of Spain flitted across the Scots Queen's 
matrimonial horizon, but neither was ever a probable suitor. Mary, 
however, selected for herself Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley — the eldest 
son of the Earl of Lennox — who as we have seen stood not far from 
the succession to the thrones both of England and of Scotland, in right 
of his descent on one side from a daughter of Henry VII. and on the 
other from a daughter of James II. Darnley himself passed for a Catholic, 
and the union would strengthen Mary's hold on the English Catholics. 
Unhappily for Mary, Darnley was utterly unfitted for the position she gave 
him. Intellectually and morally he was entirely despicable, as she was 
soon to find to her cost. Moreover the marriage alarmed and angered 
many of Mary's Protestant subjects, including Moray, who took up arms, 
but then thought it better to retire from Scotland. Mary was now manag- 
ing her own affairs and ignoring her husband, who was easily inspired 
with a furious jealousy towards her Italian secretary, David Rizzio. The 
secretary was likewise detested by the Scots Lords because the queen 
placed her confidence in him and distrusted them. Several of them 
entered into a "band" with Darnley himself for the slaying of Rizzio, and 
the secretary was butchered almost before Mary's very eyes in the palace 
of Holyrood. 

Mary was without a friend she could trust, tied to a husband whom 
she loathed most deservedly, surrounded by men who had proved them- 
selves utterly unscrupulous. And yet there was one daring ruffian whom 
she did trust, or at least on whose loyalty to her she relied, James Hepburn, 
Earl of Bothwell ; but for practical purposes she was a woman helpless 
in the hands of her enemies — a girl rather, for she was but three-and- 
twenty when her husband and his fellow-conspirators committed their 
unpardonable outrage. She would have been either more or less than 
human if her soul had not longed for vengeance, and, above all, vengeance 
on her husband. Yet since she could not strike, she suffered herself 
to make some show of reconciliation leading up to a new tragedy. There 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 323 

were many of the Scots Lords who were ready to help her to that, for 
Darnley was unendurable. Before twelve months were out the vengeance 
fell. Mary and her husband were together. He was ill, and they were 
quartered, not at Holyrood, but in a house called Kirk o' Field close to 
Edinburgh, a house which had been selected by Bothwell and Maitland 
of Lethington, the cleverest politician in Scotland. Fortunately for Moray, 
who had been restored to favour, his wife fell ill and he was summoned 
to her side. One of the queen's servants was to be married, and late that 
night Mary left the doomed house to attend the bridal masque. Before she 
could return, the house was blown up. When search was made, the body 
of Darnley was found close by, dead, but bearing no signs of injury. 




Queen Mary surrenders to the Confederate Lords at the battle of Carbery Hill, 1567. 
[From " Vetusta Monumenta."] 

Was Mary guilty ? On the evidence, as we have it, a modern jury in 
a law court would be obliged to acquit her, because guilt is not definitely 
proved ; but it would be difficult to find twelve men any one of whom after 
hearing the evidence , believed in his heart that she was morally innocent. 
The first quite plain fact is that the murder was carried out by Bothwell, the 
next that Maitland and Morton were both privy to it. It is scarcely possible 
to doubt that Mary left Kirk o' Field that night without any expectation of 
seeing her husband alive again. It is not easy to doubt that Moray at least 
suspected that the tragedy was imminent, and deliberately absented himself 
in order to avoid inconvenient entanglement. But this amounts to no more 
than saying that both Mary and Moray knew enough to enable them to 
save Darnley if either of them had chosen to do so. 



324 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

The standard of political morality which refused to connive at assassi- 
nation was exceedingly rare outside of England. Philip of Spain and a whole 
series of his ambassadors connived at plots for the murder of Queen 
Elizabeth, and for the murder of William of Orange. In France the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew was the deliberate letting loose of religious 
fanaticism in order to achieve a political end by assassination on an 
enormous scale. In England one Spanish ambassador noted with extreme 
disgust the difficulty of getting any one to lend himself to such expedients ; 
the Englishman's passion for doing everything by form of law was too 

strong. Yet Henry VIII. had en- 
couraged the murder of Cardinal 
Beaton, while in Scotland assassi- 
nation was almost a commonplace ; 
and so far as Mary herself was 
guilty, she shared her guilt with 
the very men who sought to turn 
her ruin to their own advance- 
ment. 

But the special points are : 
first, that there was a political as 
well as a personal motive for the 
crime, because Darnley had fully 
proved that so long as he lived 
either his follies or his vices would 
make havoc of every political 
design of Mary's ; and next, that 
the current morality of the period, 
even while it forbade persons in 
high positions openly to associate 
themselves with such crimes, did 
not by any means prohibit a very flimsily veiled connivance. The thing 
that was fatal to Mary Stuart was precisely the recklessness with which 
she permitted her actions to tear in pieces the flimsy veil which propriety 
demanded. If the unhappy queen had not chosen to marry the murderer 
himself almost on the morrow of his deed her actual complicity would 
probably have been, not acknowledged, but both assumed and condoned. 
As it was, she made herself an accessory after the fact, and gave the 
whole crime the appearance of being, not political, but the outcome of a 
guilty amour ; though it can never be proved beyond question that she had 
more than an inkling of the plot beforehand. 

The drama moved forward swiftly. Three months after the murder 
Mary was Both well's wife. Another month, and at Carbery Hill she sur- 
rendered to the lords who had risen in arms, while Bothwell made his 
escape. She was carried to Lochleven Castle, and while there was com- 
pelled to sign a deed of abdication in favour of the infant she had borne 




James Stewart, Earl of Moray. 
[Regent of Scotland.] 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 32^ 

between the two murders ; Moray being nominated as regent, with a 
council which included Morton, who has already been named as one of 
those privy to the murder of Darnley. 

The arrangements of the new government were by no means to the 
mind of all the nobles, and Moray had some hard work before his 
authority was completely enforced. Even then the Hamiltons, angry at 
being set aside in favour of Moray, succeeded in contriving Mary's escape 
from Lochleven, and gathering a force to restore her to the throne. Just 
eleven months after Carbery Hill, Mary struck her last blow for her crown 
on Scottish soil at Langside. The battle was short and decisive. The 
queen's troops were completely routed ; she herself fled southward, crossed 
the Solway, and threw herself on the generosity of her loving sister of 
England. 

IV 

CROSS CURRENTS 

The England of 1568 was by no means the England of 1558. Ten 
years of a steady, honest, and business-like government had established the 
national finances on a sound basis, completely restored public confidence, 
and revived the activity of trade. The regulation of home trade and 
industry had been reorganised by the Statute of Apprentices. The process 
of enclosure had apparently been brought to a natural end, because the 
time had arrived when it was no longer obviously advantageous to the 
landowner to convert arable land into pasture ; there was no more dis- 
placement of labour, and the labour which had already been displaced 
was beginning to find industrial instead of agricultural employment. The 
moral depression of the years preceding Elizabeth's accession had passed 
away, giving place to a spirit of energetic self-confidence which was finding 
expression in the adventurous activities of the seamen. Elizabeth was 
firmly seated on her throne, and the fact had become obvious to the world, 
as well as to the queen and to Cecil, that neither France nor Spain would 
or could openly assume the championship of Mary Stuart's title to the 
throne of England. Any attempt to do so by one of those two Powers 
would compel the intervention of the other, and both already had too 
much on their hands to enter upon outside adventures which did not 
promise immediate and certain benefit. England, in short, had passed from 
a condition of instability to one of assured stability. The immediate 
trouble which vexed the souls of her statesmen was the question of the 
succession if anything should happen to Elizabeth, a question which 
Elizabeth herself preferred to leave to chance. She had no intention of 
dying, and what might happen if she should die interested her less than 
the control of events during her own lifetime. 

Such was the position when Mary Stuart crossed the Solway, and by 



326 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

so doing presented Elizabeth with a very inconvenient problem. If she 
restored her cousin in Scotland by force she would alienate Scottish 
Protestantism. If she handed her over to the victorious Lords of the 
Congregation she would be condoning rebellion. If she allowed Mary 
passage to France, and the queen were reinstated in Scotland by French 

aid, she would in effect be restoring the 
old French ascendency in Scotland. She 
rejected each of these courses and resolved 
to keep Mary a prisoner in her own hands, 
in spite of the risk of her becoming a 
figurehead for any conspiracies directed 
against Elizabeth herself. 

But the first thing to do was to minimise 
Mary's power for harm and at the same 
time to get some sort of colour for holding 
her prisoner. Elizabeth could plausibly 
assert that she was not justified in restoring 
Mary until the charges brought against her 
by her subjects had been investigated. 
Mary could not prevent an investigation, 
however vehemently she might deny that 
the English queen had any right of juris- 
diction in the matter. So a commission 
was appointed at York, and later transferred 
to Westminster, before which the Scots 
Lords were invited to defend their own 
actions, which meant in plain fact to 
formulate their charges. They did so and 
put in their evidence, including the famous 
Casket Letters ; documents which, if they 
had actually been written by Queen Mary, 
carried absolute proof of her guilt. The 
evidence having been produced, further 
proceedings were stopped. There was 

Sir Thomas Gresham, Banker and Merchant no crOSS-examination, 110 admission of 

evidence on the other side. Mary of course 
could not be condemned, but Elizabeth did 
not wish to condemn her ; she merely wished to blacken her character 
thoroughly in the eyes of the world, and, having done so with complete 
success, to retain a large latitude of choice in such further action as 
expediency might suggest. 

Mary was kept in ward, but the publication of the charges against her 
did not prevent her from at once becoming the centre of plotting among 
disloyal Romanists. The Duke of Norfolk, the premier peer of the kingdom, 
had been one of the commissioners for her trial ; but the evidence did 




under Mary and Elizabeth. 
[From a statue in Gresham College. ] 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 327 

not dissuade him from himself contemplating marriage with Mary. The 
earldom of Northumberland had been restored to the Percies, and in 1569 
the Northern earls rose with the design of setting the Catholic Mary on the 
throne of England. The rising was crushed, and the earls of Northumber- 
land and Westmorland were driven from the country ; but the general 
effect was to bring wavering supporters of the old religion decisively into 
the ranks of the loyalists. The world as a matter of course believed that 
Mary had been involved in the conspiracy, and popular animosity towards 
her was intensified ; though as 
before it did not suit Elizabeth to 
take any steps for proving either 
her guilt or her innocence. 

Catholic loyalty to the Crown 
would probably have been com- 
pletely confirmed, but for the Pope's 
blunder in issuing a bull deposing 
Elizabeth and laying upon all good 
Catholics the duty of seeking her 
removal from the throne, while 
instructing them to maintain an 
appearance of loyalty until the 
moment should arrive for striking. 
The host of loyal Catholics who 
set patriotism before their allegiance 
to the Pope were placed in a hope- 
lessly false position. The most 
fervent declarations of loyalty were 
compatible with complete accept- 
ance of the papal bull ; which 
accordingly made every adherent 
of the old religion a suspect, and 
of necessity led to a greatly in- 
creased rigour in the application of 
the laws against papal practices ; so that from this time onward adherence 
to Romanism became politically dangerous, while it entailed a considerable 
degree of petty persecution. 

The sentiment of hostility to Rome and all her works was intensified, 
and there was a growing feeling in favour of England standing forth as 
the champion of Protestantism and the ally of Protestants, whether they 
were French Huguenots or Netherlanders struggling against Alva and the 
tyranny of Spain. English Protestantism fully recognised Spain as the 
enemy, all the more readily because English seamen were endeavouring to 
force their way into the New World, where Spain blocked the entry, and 
sailors who fell into the hands of the Spaniards were handed over as 
heretics to the tender mercies of the Inquisition. But Elizabeth, while she 




Town houses in the 1 6th century. 
[From Barclay's " Ship of Fools," 1570.] 



328 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

knew that sooner or later England would have to fight Spain, was 
determined to put off the evil day as long as possible. The primary object 
of her diplomacy was to avert war at least until she felt strong enough to be 
sure of victory. She would not openly quarrel with Spain. But at the 
same time she was supremely anxious to preserve amicable relations with 
the government of France, whether Huguenots or Catholics were dominant. 

At the end of 157 1 an open rupture was with difficulty averted. 
A plot was discovered, for which the agent in England was one Ridolfi, 
which aimed at liberating Mary, marrying her to Norfolk, setting her on 
the throne, and killing Elizabeth. It was abundantly clear that the Spanish 
ambassador Don Guerau de Espes was in the plot. He was expelled from 
the country, and if parliament had had its way Mary would have been 
attainted and executed ; but Elizabeth held fast to her own scheme of 
treatment for the captive. Philip himself was paralysed for action by the 
sudden outburst of a fresh revolt in the Netherlands, which Alva imagined 
himself to have brought into subjection. Elizabeth was dallying with 
projects for her own marriage, first with Henry of Anjou, the heir-presump- 
tive of his brother Charles IX. in France, and then with his still younger 
brother, Francis of Alencon, who was only some twenty years younger than 
herself. 

But again the situation was changed by an appalling tragedy. France 
was apparently on the verge of a religious settlement. Huguenot influence 
was predominant, and the Bourbon Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot figure- 
head, and heir to the crown after the king's brothers, was about to marry 
the king's sister. There was a vast gathering of Huguenots in Paris for the 
celebration of the wedding, which took place on August 18th. Six days 
later the streets of Paris were running red with the blood of the victims of 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The possibility of a French marriage 
for Elizabeth for the time being vanished completely ; to the disappoint- 
ment of Elizabeth's ministers, who had hoped by means of it to secure 
France as a Protestant force in European politics. Indeed, whether she 
were Catholic or Protestant, France's political interests were so vitally 
antagonistic to those of Philip that even after St. Bartholomew, Orange 
would have accepted a French protectorate as the price of French aid 
when he despaired of definite assistance from England. 

In the repulsion aroused in England by the massacre, Philip found his 
opportunity for reviving an appearance of amity with Elizabeth, in order 
to deter her from active intervention on behalf of the Netherland 
Protestants. Alva, by his own wish, was recalled from the Netherlands, 
and a governor whose methods were less drastic took his place. The 
southern provinces were detached from the revolt by proposals for meeting 
their constitutional demands as distinct from the religious demands of the 
northern provinces. Popular sympathy in England remained with Orange, 
but Elizabeth's personal views were antagonistic to the encouragement of 
subjects who declined to have their religion dictated to them by their 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 329 

legitimate sovereign. In plain terms, her sympathies as a ruler were with 
Philip, though she felt the political expediency of fostering the forces 
which held him in check. She could not afford to allow the Protestant 
provinces to be crushed completely, but she would give them no more 
than just enough help to preserve them from destruction, and that help 
was given grudgingly and secretly. 

And so she and Philip, each privily seeking to damage the other as much 
as possible, both publicly in- 
sisted on their desire for a re- 
conciliation and an adjustment 
of the grievances of which the 
two countries complained. At 
the same time neither had the 
slightest intention of conced- 
ing what the other most 
strongly insisted on, Elizabeth 
demanding for English sailors 
in Spanish ports immunity 
from the claims of the In- 
quisition to seize them as 
heretics, while Philip de- 
manded the suppression and 
punishment of the seamen 
whom he regarded as pirates. 
Still the mutual protestations 
of goodwill seemed &o be quite 
promising when, for the first 
time since the Ridolfi plot, a 
Spanish ambassador, Bernar- 
dino de Mendoza, appeared' 
in England in 1578. The 
time, however, was at hand 
when the papacy and the Jesuits were to take up the business of attacking 
England. 

In the meanwhile Scotland was enduring the government of regencies 
in the name of the child James VI. Moray ruled with vigour and ability, 
but eighteen months had hardly passed since Langside when he was assassi- 
nated. After that canie chaos, which after a considerable period issued in 
the predominance of Morton, who became regent at the end of 1572. It 
was not till then that that party among the nobles who had attached them- 
selves to the scheme of restoring Mary to the throne was definitely crushed. 
For six years Morton remained supreme, enforcing the law with a strong 
hand, and with justice except when injustice was better suited to his 
personal interest. But such rule was popular with no class of the com- 
munity. He was a political Protestant who would by no means counte- 




Queen Elizabeth hunting. 
[From Turberville, " Noble Art of Venerie," 1575.] 



330 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

nance the claims of the Calvinistic clergy to assume the position of the 
prophets of Israel. The government needed money, and its exactions fell 
heavily on the common people. The nobles wanted to go their own way, 
whereas Morton made them go his. In 1578 he realised that he had 
brought together such a formidable combination of enemies that he resigned 
the regency ; but the chaos which immediately followed soon enabled him 
to recover a brief ascendency, which was again broken down through the 
appearance in Scotland of the king's cousin, Esm6 Stewart or D'Aubigny, 
who was now the male representative of the Lennox Stewarts. 



V 

IRELAND 

The rule of St. Leger in Ireland had pointed not very conclusively to 
the possibility that combined firmness and tact might introduce into the 
country some conception of law and order as ends which it might be 
generally profitable to pursue. St. Leger had been superseded by Belling- 
ham, who had taught the Irish chiefs that lawlessness and disorder might 
entail very unpleasant consequences, under a stern English governor with 
an adequate force at his disposal. But he had also inspired the Irish 
with a fervent dislike to any kind of E'dglish government which did not 
allow them to go their own way. If they had had any capacity for com- 
bination, Bellingham's disappearance would probably have been the signal 
for a concerted uprising with which the governments of Edward VI. and Mary 
would have been quite unable to deal. But they preferred relapsing into 
general disorder, and English rule was again hardly felt outside the Pale 
except in the south, where, perhaps owing to jealousy of the Geraldines, 
the Butlers were consistently loyal to England. 

Now, while Mary was still reigning in England, there arose in Ulster 
a leader who presently caused serious trouble to Elizabeth. This was 
Shane O'Neill, who was the legitimate heir of the Earl of Tyrone, although 
the peculiarities of Irish custom allowed the recognition in his place of 
a younger and illegitimate brother. Matters were simplified when the 
brother was killed, leaving a youthful heir. Shane, in accordance with 
another Irish custom, got himself elected as " the O'Neill," chief of the 
traditionally dominant clan of Ulster. In this capacity he rapidly made 
his power felt, and became practically master of the north of Ireland, 
where he exacted an obedience to his rule not less effective than that 
exercised by the English government within the Pale. There the English 
Deputy, the Earl of Sussex, was forced to rely upon his English soldiery, 
who were generally speaking the worst kind of riff-raff ; whose per- 
petual misconduct persistently destroyed the moral effects which ought 
to have followed upon the enforcement of authority. Shane's indepen- 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 331 

dence caused the Deputy to attack him in arms, with the result that his 
expedition narrowly escaped being cut to pieces. 

Elizabeth made up her mind that Shane was a fitter subject for con- 
ciliation than for coercion. He was summoned to England, whither he 
came under a safe conduct, and where he studied English ways with 
Lord Robert Dudley, the future Earl of Leicester, as his tutor. But during 
his absence, wild disorder raged in Ulster. Elizabeth was obliged to re- 
cognise that he was the one man who could rule Ulster, and to let him return 
with very large authority sanctioned by the queen. For the next three 
years O'Neill was consolidating his rule. Elizabeth's ministers, with 
benevolent intent, devised the scheme of dividing Ireland into four pre- 
sidencies or provinces. One was to be the Pale, that is Leinster ; O'Neill 
was to be president in Ulster, a Geraldine in Munster, and a Burke or 
an O'Brien in Connaught. This system in the two latter provinces only 
opened the way to violent tribal feuds ; while O'Neill continued to prove 
himself the one strong man, though his methods were rather those of 
an oriental potentate than of a western ruler, 

In 1566 Sir Henry Sidney came to Ireland as Deputy, and Shane found 
an antagonist who taxed his abilities to the utmost. Sidney promptly 
informed Elizabeth that, if English government was to prevail in Ireland, 
O'Neill must be suppressed, to which end he must have the necessary 
forces. With extreme difficulty the supplies were extorted from the 
reluctant queen. Sidney's diplomacy dissuaded Desmond from joining 
O'Neill ; Sidney himself marched into Ulster ; the O'Donnells of Tyrconnel, 
who had an old complaint against O'Neill, rose to take vengeance. O'Neill 
had to fly and take refuge among his very dubious friends, the Scottish 
colony of Antrim, and there he lost his life in a brawl. 

So fell the* first Irish chief who may be suspected of having formed the 
deliberate design of throwing off the English yoke ; for such a description 
would hardly apply to the men who had supported the adventure of 
Edward Bruce two and a half centuries before. And Shane had set the 
ominous example of opening correspondence with foreign Powers on the 
basis of national Irish loyalty to the Roman religion. With O'Neill's fall 
Elizabeth's government began trying to enforce the Act of Uniformity out- 
side the Pale ; and from that time forward the religious grievance took its 
place beside the national grievance against English domination. 

In the years that followed both these grievances were greatly embittered, 
and a third, thenceforth of vital importance, began to assume an acute form. 
Over the greater part of Ireland the relations between the occupiers and the 
owners of the soil were fixed in fact, not by English law, but by the Celtic 
tribal traditions of centuries. The customs according to English ideas 
were bad ; but bad or good, the Irish people were passionately attached to 
them. The Englishman likes to believe that political institutions are a 
.matter of common sense in which there is no room for sentiment. When 
sentiment gets the better of him, he persuades himself that it is not sentiment 



332 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

at all but common sense. With the Celt, sentiment stands first, and a very 
long way first. The Elizabethan Englishman proposed to substitute 
common sense for sentiment in the government of Ireland. His common 
sense taught him that if Ireland were planted with English colonies, 
English laws were applied to the holding of land, and English law generally 
were enforced, sentiment would die a natural death, and Ireland would 
become a second England. Incidentally the process appeared to demand 
the treatment of the native Irish as unreasoning savages, brutal and 
treacherous, on whom it was useless to waste intelligent argument or 
human sympathy. They must be ruled by brute force. There was indeed 
a good deal of excuse for the point of view. Irish sentiment being unin- 
telligible to the Englishman, the Englishman attributed its existence to lack 
of intelligence in the Irishman ; and the Irishman, being treated as outside 
the pale of civilisation, acted accordingly. But in his eyes it was the 
Englishman who was the aggressor. 

In an evil hour, then, the English hit upon the happy expedient of 
planting English colonies ; in an evil hour, because every circumstance 
combined to ensure the maximum of hostility between the colonists and the 
natives. The land to be colonised was provided by the seizure of domains 
for which the holders could prove no title valid in English law, however 
secure it might be according to Irish customs. These lands were conferred 
upon adventurers, chiefly gentlemen from Devon, who were prepared to 
take care of themselves without expense to the English government — an 
arrangement which appealed to the economical soul of Elizabeth. The 
scheme was applied in the province of Munster very shortly after the death 
of Shane O'Neill. Another experiment of the same kind was tried in 
Ulster. In both cases the attempt to rule with an iron hand was met by 
savage outbreaks and massacres, answered by equally savage reprisals ; and 
the English government still refused to provide the government of Ireland 
with the supply of well-paid troops under thorough discipline which the 
situation absolutely demanded. The alternatives were a despotic but care- 
fully just rule maintained by a palpably irresistible force, or a consistently 
conciliatory attitude. There was a possibility that either policy might have 
had a really successful issue. But the Irish got neither, and every day 
hatred of England and of English rule struck its roots deeper and deeper. 



VI 

THE SEAMEN 

In the first twenty years of Elizabeth's reign she and her ministers 
restored order where there had been chaos : a stable government, sound 
finance, a religious peace in which the great bulk of the nation acquiesced. 
France and Spain both learnt that England would go on its own way, 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 333 

indifferent to any threats from any foreign Power, knowing that whatever 
they might threaten, they were impotent to take effective action against her. 
England was playing no heroic part ; she rejected the role of the champion 
of Liberty, civil or religious. She would embark on no great adventure. 
The second half of the reign was to see her challenging and breaking the 
might of the greatest Power in Europe, and asserting for herself an un- 
qualified supremacy by sea. It was to see her also step into the front rank 
among the peoples who have given to the world great poets and great 
thinkers. Already, however, in 1579, while as yet scarcely a hint had 
appeared of the literary splendours which were so soon to burst forth, the 
English seamen knew that when the hour of conflict should arrive, their own 
supremacy was assured. 

In the narrow seas English sailors had always held their own since the 
days when Hubert de Burgh dispersed a French Armada off Dover. The 
two great Edwards and Henry V. had been alive to the uses of fighting 
fleets, which English statesmen occasionally endeavoured to foster, with no 
very marked success, by Navigation Acts. But, until the sixteenth century, 
the recognised maritime Powers were the dwellers on the Mediterranean, 
and the Portuguese. The reign of Henry VIII., however, saw signs of 
the coming maritime expansion. The creation of a royal navy was that 
monarch's pet hobby ; it was the one useful object on which he expended 
a portion of the spoils of the monasteries. He was the first king who really 
owned a considerable navy of fighting ships, although in the ten years after 
his death its strength in numbers and in tonnage was reduced to about one 
half. 

But, in fact, England was awakening to a consciousness of her maritime 
destiny. English sailors were making adventurous expeditions, intent on 
exploration or on commerce ; even the reign of Edward VI. witnessed the 
departure of the expedition of Willoughby and Chancellor in search of a 
north-east passage to the Indies — an expedition which resulted in the 
" discovery of Muscovy," the opening of direct communications with Russia. 
But by the time of Elizabeth's accession they were already turning emulous 
eyes to the realms of fabulous wealth where the Spaniard had established 
his dominion. Apart from that shoulder of South America which the Pope 
had inadvertently bestowed upon Portugal, the whole of that continent, as 
well as North America up to Florida, was regarded by the King of Spain as 
his private estate, in which a strict trading monopoly was preserved. That 
trading monopoly was'resented by the English, who claimed that it was in 
contravention of past treaties. Moreover, it was inconvenient to the 
Spaniards themselves, to whom English sailors brought goods which they 
were prohibited from buying, but were quite ready to buy on some show of 
compulsion. 

John Hawkins, to his profit, broke through the official barriers with a 
cargo of negro slaves, purchased from native chiefs on the African coast. 
The negro was a much more efficient labourer than the so-called " Indian " 



334 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

of America, and John Hawkins repeated the experiment. His first venture 
had displeased the King of Spain, and the official barriers were less easily 
penetrated the second time. But they yielded to a formal display of force. 
Hawkins sold his slaves and returned to England a wealthy man, but 
under official Spanish condemnation as a pirate. 

He sailed a third time, and with him his young cousin Francis Drake. 
His previous experiences were repeated, but when he had already started 

for home his three ships were 
driven back by stress of 
weather to the Mexican port 
of San Juan D'Ulloa. He 
was received with entire 
friendliness, but, while he 
was still in port, a large 
Spanish squadron arrived 

Knife which belonged to Drake. , , ,_., 

on the scene. The attitude 
of friendliness was maintained ; but Hawkins' suspicions were aroused, 
and he was preparing for departure when the Spaniards made a sudden 
attack upon him. Hawkins and Drake, with two of the ships, escaped ; 
but with the loss of a large part of the crews, many of whom fell into the 
hands of the Inquisition, to be treated not as pirates — for which there 
would have been technical excuse — but as heretics. England and Spain 
were at peace ; but from this time forward both English and Spaniards 
acted on the hypothesis that beyond the 
line — not the Equator but the Pope's 
boundary line between Spaniards on the 
west and Portuguese on the east of it — 
there was a declared state of war. 




Jfbrttis I*y&''"\7^Jti4/6 r ib*.* ■ 




Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, at Java. 
[ From the Chart of Drake's voyages. ] 



Five years later, in 1572, Francis 
Drake set sail with a small company in 
three ships for the Spanish Main, the 
mainland of South America. The ex- 
pedition was in the technical sense wholly 
piratical, that is to say, he intended to 
seize by force any Spanish treasure 
which fell in his way. Cecil, who about this time became known as 
Lord Burleigh, was perhaps the only prominent Englishman who viewed 
such proceedings with disfavour ; he had in full measure that passion for 
legality which has usually been so marked a feature in the English 
character. But the rest of his countrymen, with the queen at their head, 
had no compunction whatever in encouraging such ventures, participating 
in the risks, or sharing the profits ; although the proprieties might compel 
them personally to remain in the background. Drake seized a quantity 
of treasure in the Spanish emporium Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus 
of Darien, Then he laid up his ships, penetrated the Isthmus, saw the 



THE ELIZABETHAN RECONSTRUCTION 335 

Pacific, and swore that he would sail upon those seas. On his way back 
to the coast he fell in with two treasure-laden mule-trains, and returned, 
well recompensed, to England. 

Thence he sailed again on the most famous of all his voyages in the 
last month of 1577. Meanwhile another adventurer, John Oxenham, more 
reckless though not more daring, had won the credit of being the first 
Englishman to sail on the Pacific Ocean, having, like Drake, crossed the 
Isthmus of Darien and then built himself a pinnace with which he surprised 
and looted two Spanish treasure-ships. Oxenham, however, was caught 
and killed. 

Drake started on his great voyage with the intention of doing what only 
one man had done before him, entering the Pacific by the Strait of 
Magellan. So daring a scheme was undreamed of by the Spaniards, and 
twelve months after he first set sail, Drake with his famous ship the Pelican, 
renamed the Golden Hind, began his raids on Spanish ports and Spanish 
treasure-ships, on the west coast of South America. Enormous prizes fell 
into his hands; but he evaded the Spanish ships which were sent after 
him, and, sailing northward with the idea of possibly discovering a north- 
east passage, he touched at California. Thither he returned again to refit, 
when further exploration decided him against attempting the northern 
voyage. He declined the divine honours proffered to him by the Cali- 
fornian natives, and made his way home through the Southern Archipelago 
and round the Cape of Good Hope — -the first captain who had in person 
conducted and completed the circumnavigation of the globe. The Golden 
Hind sailed into Plymouth Sound on September 26th, 1580. 

Already another^ of the great captains, Martin Frobisher, had made three 
Arctic voyages, in the course of which he explored the waters now known as 
Frobisher's Sound. During the years ensuing his example was followed 
by John Davis, whose name stands second only to that of Drake in the list 
of English explorers. 

These are the conspicuous instances of the mighty spirit of adven- 
ture which had taken possession of the English seamen. Their boundless 
audacity can be felt by realising that Drake's company on his Darien 
expedition numbered less than six score ; that the Pelican herself was of 
only one hundred tons burden ; and that Martin Frobisher's first ship was 
of no more than twenty-five tons. The English seamen, in fact, carried the 
art of navigation to a pitch hitherto unprecedented ; and they discovered 
the all-important fact that with sufficient breezes the sailing ship in skilful 
hands was a more efficient instrument than the oar-driven galley. They 
found by practical experience that a well-handled English ship could sail 
round a Spanish galleon of thrice the size and pound it to pieces with com- 
paratively little injury to itself. They learnt how to handle ships and how 
to build them, how to mount their guns so as to pour in broadsides, 
while the Spaniard still held the conventional belief that the business of a 
ship in battle was to ram or to grapple her opponent and leave the fighting 



336 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

to the soldiers. Even before Drake's return, and very much more so after 
it, the English sailors knew themselves a match for the Spaniards. They 
had learned to hate Spain as the instrument of the Inquisition and also as the 
monopoliser of the wealth of the New World ; to hate her and to crave 
for her destruction as the enemy of England ; and they had learnt also 
how her destruction was to be wrought. Their hour was at hand. 




Drake's voyage round the world, I 577-1580. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 

I 

THE JESUIT ATTACK 

In the year 1578, Philip's lieutenant in the Netherlands was his half-brother 
Don John of Austria, who enjoyed a brilliant reputation as a soldier and 
was meditating grandiose schemes of his own which probably included his 
marriage with Mary Stuart. Elizabeth, as we have seen, had no real 
sympathy with William of Orange, since she hated and feared the doctrine 
that subjects might legitimately offer armed resistance to their lawful sove- 
reign. But she could not afford to see the Provinces crushed, because 
Philip would then be left free to employ all his energies against England. 
She did not want openly to take the part of the Provinces, but there was 
a possibility that France might do so out of antagonism to Philip, even 
although the King, Henry III., was suspected and feared by the Protestants 
as having been very deeply implicated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 
Now both Elizabeth and Burleigh in their hearts were more afraid of 
France than of Spain ; not as matters actually stood, but if France should 
succeed in healing her internal discords and aggrandising herself at the 
expense of Spain. 

Elizabeth therefore could not view with equanimity the prospect of 
Orange throwing himself completely upon French support and accepting 
a French protectorate. And yet she wanted to impose upon France the 
burden of supporting the Netherlands revolt. To this end in the year 1578 
she revived the old business of negotiating for her own marriage with 
Francis of Alencon. Alencon was more or less in alliance with the French 
Huguenots ; in the event of a French protectorate the office of Protector 
would be conferred upon him ; and Elizabeth hoped to keep him virtually 
under her own control by dangling before him the prospect of a marriage 
with herself. For five years she managed to keep up the farce, always 
evading the actual marriage, although more than once she seemed to have 
committed herself so far as to make withdrawal impossible. 

Late in the year 1578 Don John died, and was succeeded as governor 
of the Netherlands by Alexander of Parma, the ablest soldier and one of 
the ablest statesmen of the age. Politically Parma succeeded in narrowing 
the issue in the Netherlands by detaching the Southern Catholics from 

337 Y 



338 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

the Northern Protestants ; but by so doing he gave the struggle the definite 
character of a war waged by the United Provinces of the North for the 
preservation of their religious liberty. The one thing certain was that those 
provinces would hold out to the last gasp. English volunteers fought for 
the Dutch in the Low Countries ; England secretly supplied Orange with 
funds just sufficient to preserve from complete financial collapse ; and 
Elizabeth kept Alencon in play. Such was the inglorious part which she 
chose to take in that glorious struggle. 

But England herself now became the object of attack ; a papal attack 
which Philip of Spain fostered in the same sort of fashion as Elizabeth 
herself fostered Philip's enemies and encouraged the depredations of the 
English seamen. The agents of the attack were the Jesuits and the English 
Romanist zealots trained by Cardinal Allen in his seminary first at Douai 
and then at Rheims. These were men who for the most part believed with 
an entire conviction that their first patriotic duty towards England was to 
bring her back to the Roman fold at whatever political cost. The attack 
was threefold. It was directed to the resuscitation in Scotland of a 
Catholic party, which should appeal to national sentiment by pressing the 
claim of the Stuart succession to the throne of England. In Ireland it 
sought to raise insurrection ; and in England itself it developed a vigorous 
Romanist propaganda, associated with the doctrine that Romanists were 
bound to do everything in their power to subvert the government of 
Elizabeth but were individually free to follow any course which might 
divert suspicions of disloyalty. 

In Scotland the agent of the scheme was Esme Stuart, who captured 
the confidence of the young king by professing to have been converted to 
Protestantism by his superhuman dialectical skill. But though Esme' 
Stuart was made Duke of Lennox and compassed the downfall and execu- 
tion of Morton, there was no effective Romanist reaction ; and Scotland 
was not attracted into hostility to the English government. 

In Ireland the flame was kindled by the Jesuit emissary Sandars, who 
arrived in the island as Papal Nuncio, and by Fitzmaurice, an exiled rebel 
who was Desmond's cousin. The murder of two English officers started 
the conflagration. Half Munster rose, and Desmond was drawn into 
assuming the leadership. Malby, the English president of Connaught, 
dashed into Munster, swept through it with fire and sword, and having, as 
he hoped, terrorised the province sufficiently, fell back into Connaught. 
The moment he was gone Desmond again issued from his fortress of 
Ashketyn, and recovered the mastery of Munster. For some time the war 
took the shape of a series of savage raids and counter-raids, till Elizabeth 
was at last driven to provide sufficient supplies. But just as it seemed that 
the insurrection would be stamped out, the Catholics in the Pale itself rose, 
and a force of Italian and Spanish adventurers landed in the south-west at 
Smerwick. The Deputy himself, Lord Grey de Wilton, met with a disastrous 
defeat among the mountains of Wicklow. The revival of the insurrection, 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 339 

however, was brief. There was no organisation among the insurgents. In 
the late autumn Grey marched to the south and laid siege to Smerwick, 
supported by a squadron of English ships which had been despatched to 
his assistance. Smerwick was forced to surrender at discretion and the 
garrison were put to the sword. Its fall was practically decisive. A 
desultory struggle was still maintained, the English hanging and slaying 
ruthlessly wherever they met with resistance, while the Irish slaughtered 
the English whenever an opportunity occurred. A couple of years passed 
before the smoulderings of revolt were completely stam-ped out, but the 
Irish leaders had learnt that they were not strong enough to fight the 
English unaided and that active aid from 
Philip would not be forthcoming. He was 
willing to use them as catspaws, but would 
not commit himself on their behalf. 

In England the papal mission was in 
the charge of Parsons and Campian. 
Campian was a single-minded enthusiast, 
ready for martyrdom in the holy cause of 
the Redemption of England ; a man with- 
out guile and with no suspicion of the 
sinister purposes of which his own simplicity 
and enthusiasm were being made the in- 
struments. It was his business to inspire 
religious zeal ; it was that of his colleague 
to adapt that work to political ends — in 
other words, to foster treason. The country 
was flooded with Jesuit emissaries of both 
types. But they found their match in the 
Secretary Francis Walsingham, who for some twenty years counteracted 
every conspiracy and plot that was concocted by a consummate system of 
espionage. Invariably at the critical moment Walsingham's hand fell. 
His methods were unscrupulous. His own hands were clean. He was 
absolutely incorruptible, absolutely devoted to the cause of his country and 
of Protestantism. He was the one minister who never hesitated to speak 
his mind to Elizabeth, the one man of whom she herself was afraid. But 
if his own hands were clean, he had no hesitation in employing the basest 
instruments and leaving them to employ the basest means in his warfare 
with enemies who, in his belief, could be fought effectively only with their 
own weapons. Walsingham was mainly responsible for the employment 
in England of torture, not as a form of punishment, but in order to extract 
evidence from reluctant witnesses. In his excuse it can only be urged that 
torture was universally employed outside of England, and was universally 
condoned by public opinion. It was now freely employed against the 
Jesuits, who displayed the same admirable constancy which is habitually 
shown by the martyrs of religious enthusiasm, whatever their creed. 




Francis Walsins;ham. 



340 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Campian himself was one of the victims whose sufferings and death really 
furthered, instead of injuring, the cause for which they died. 

But the cause against which Walsingham was fighting was ruined by 
the attendant disclosures, in spite of the aid it received from the blood of 
its martyrs. More than ever in the eyes of the public at large, as well as 
of statesmen, Romanism was identified with treason, and the Jesuit mission 
drove the parliament of 1581 to impose new penal laws upon the Catholics. 
Those who had remained loyal to the old faith were heavily penalised for 
celebrating the Roman Mass and for non-attendance at Anglican services. 
It was made treason to become a convert, or to attempt to make converts, 
to Rome. The lives of Catholics were made a burden to them, and the 
burden was not removed for generations. 

In 1583 the Alencon farce came to an end. That contemptible prince 
entered on his own account upon a plot for the betrayal of the Nether- 
landers which was discovered and frustrated. From that moment his 
political career was at an end, and he vanished from the political stage on 
which he had played so prominent and so despicable a part. In the 
following year he died. 



II 

COMING TO THE GRIP 

French policy was complicated by the fact that King Henry III. and 
the court party, while they would have liked to crush the Huguenot heresy, 
detested still more the political ascendency of the Guise faction, which for 
family reasons ardently favoured the cause of Mary Stuart. Moreover the 
Guises and their extreme supporters were ready, in their religious fanaticism, 
to go so far as to seek, though not yet openly, an understanding with Spain. 
The criminal folly of Alencon strengthened the Guises. Hence developed 
the Throgmorton Plot, which as a matter of course was detected and dealt 
with at the beginning of 1584. The Guises, sundry English Catholics, 
and the Spanish ambassador in England, Mendoza, were involved in a 
scheme for a Guise invasion, of course with the object of setting Mary on 
the throne. As usual there was no definite proof produced of personal 
complicity on the part of the imprisoned queen. There was no possible 
reason why she should be dragged into it. But quite enough was revealed 
to intensify the common feeling that Elizabeth's security demanded Mary's 
death, and to warrant also redoubled severity in applying the penal laws ; 
while Mendoza was ordered to leave the country. 

Alencon's death made the Huguenot Henry of Navarre heir-pre- 
sumptive to the French throne, a prospect intolerable to the Guises, and 
to Henry III. only more tolerable than the Guise ascendency. Hence 
France was practically barred from adopting any active foreign policy 




Queen Elizabeth in Parliament, 1586. 

[From a contemporary print]. 

341 



342 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

whatever. On the other hand, the assassination of William of Orange, the 
great leader of the Dutch Protestants, threatened to destroy the Dutch 
resistance of which he had been both the soul and the brain, while it 
emphasised the unscrupulous methods of Philip of Spain. Manifestly the 
English people were ready to espouse the Dutch cause whole-heartedly ; 
had they been allowed to do so the French court party would probably have 
made common cause with them in association with the Huguenots. The 
restraining factor was Elizabeth herself, with her passion for abstaining 
from any course which so committed her that she could not withdraw. 
The grim unanimity of the nation found expression in the formation of 
"The Association," which might be called a voluntary league of English- 
men sworn to put to death any one concerned in any plot against the queen, 
and any one — meaning of course Queen Mary — in whose favour such a 
plot should be formed. Elizabeth herself, however, insisted that for such 
a person exclusion from the succession should be the penalty. At the 
same time, while the queen, then as always, refused to recognise any speci- 
fied person as her heir, arrangements were made for carrying on the govern- 
ment in case of her sudden demise. 

Now, however, the Guises openly proclaimed a Holy League, whose 
object was the exclusion of Henry of Navarre from the French succession. 
Henry the king, despairing of English support, joined hands with the 
League. Philip of Spain, reckoning that an Anglo-French alliance was now 
impossible, while Alexander of Parma was steadily and persistently pressing 
forward the subjugation of the Netherlands, sought to frighten England by 
the sudden seizure of all English ships upon his coasts. Instead of frightening 
England, he kindled thereby a sudden flame of passionate defiance. Elizabeth 
was obliged to give way to the national feeling, and openly to league her- 
self with the United Provinces. By the end of the year the Dutch had 
placed four of their ports in her hands, and an English army under 
Leicester's command had been landed in the Netherlands. 

Leicester and his troops were to render no great service to the Dutch 
cause ; but the declaration of war let Francis Drake loose against the 
Spaniards. On a private venture, though with government sanction, he 
sailed with a squadron first to the Spanish port of Vigo, captured some 
prizes, then betook himself to the West Indies, where he held first San 
Domingo and then Cartagena to ransom, and then returned home with an 
immense booty, having very efficiently demonstrated that English seaman- 
ship was fully competent to take the offensive against the might of Spain. 

In the Netherlands, Leicester at the best was but an incompetent 
commander, and the English were really paralysed by the double dealing 
and contradictory instructions from the queen, which drove even Burleigh 
himself to threats of resignation. The one thing accomplished was a 
brilliant but perfectly useless feat of arms at the battle of Zutphen, where 
Philip Sidney fell, and dying, won immortal fame. Leicester himself was 
recalled before the end of the year (1586), because, in flat contradiction to 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 343 

instructions, he accepted the formal governorship of the Netherlands, hoping 
thereby to restore in the Dutch the confidence which Elizabeth's suspected 
intrigues with Parma had destroyed. 

Meanwhile events in England had been moving towards the consum- 
mation of the tragedy of Mary Stuart. Through the long years of her 
captivity, voluntarily or involuntarily, she had provided a focus for eternal 




The Low Countries and Picardy in the 16th century. 

plots and intrigues.' Nearly all England believed that she had murdered 
Darnley to gratify her passion for Bothwell. Nearly all England believed 
that she was actively engaged in plotting for the assassination of Elizabeth 
and her own elevation to the throne. All England, with the exception 
of the extreme Catholics, viewed the possibility of her accession, whether 
as the result of conspiracy or in the natural course of events as the legiti- 
mate heir, with the gravest apprehension ; and very nearly all England 
would at any time have learnt with relief that she was dead, or would have 



344 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

welcomed her execution. But Elizabeth had stood in the way of the 
national feeling. In the first place, Mary, living, however dangerous, was 
a valuable diplomatic asset by means of which Scotland, if it turned restive, 
could always be coerced. In the second place, the sanctity of crowned 
heads was a cardinal article of the English queen's creed. The last thing 
she wished was to find herself compelled to sanction Mary's execution ; 
and whatever conspiracies were detected, she resisted all pressure to proceed 
against Mary herself in respect of them. Ever since 1568, Mary had been 
kept in strict confinement in the charge of gaolers who could be trusted 
to show her no superfluous kindness ; permitted the minimum of intercourse 
with the outside world, and perpetually conscious that her life would 
be forfeited so soon as the Queen of England might deem it to be in 
her own interest to strike. 

Now the declaration of war between England and Spain changed 
the situation. Of necessity it made Spain the open instead of only the 
secret champion of Mary's cause. There was nothing to be feared from 
Scotland, where the attempt to create a Romanist reaction had failed 
absolutely. In France, nothing Elizabeth could do would increase the 
hostility of the Guises. The uses of Mary as a captive were over, while 
every argument for her removal had gathered rather than lost force. 
Elizabeth yielded to the pressure from Burleigh and Walsingham, which 
had behind it the whole weight of English public opinion, and Walsingham 
found himself free to adopt measures which should incriminate Mary 
in charges of compassing the queen's death. 

Mary was removed to Chartley Manor, and was placed in charge of 
custodians officially less rigid than those who had hitherto been re- 
sponsible for her. Walsingham was satisfied that, with increased facilities 
for outside communication, the captive queen and her supporters would 
commit some indiscretion which would place her in his power. His 
expectation was fully warranted. A plot of the usual kind was set on 
foot, in which the leading part, which included the assassination of Eliza- 
beth, was assigned to a young enthusiast named Anthony Babington. The 
conspirators found it almost unexpectedly easy to open communications 
with Chartley Manor — one of the most active and apparently most zealous of 
their number being a traitor in Walsingham's pay. Correspondence passed 
in and out of Chartley Manor, but each letter passed en route through the 
hand of an agent of Walsingham, who took a copy of it before allowing 
it to proceed to its destination. But no one could condemn Mary for 
being privy to a plot for her own liberation, seeing that there was no 
kind of legal authority for her detention. It was some time before 
Walsingham's agent could produce a letter conclusively associating Mary 
with the plot as one for the assassination of Elizabeth. But with that 
letter in his hands Walsingham had all he wanted. The conspirators 
were arrested, tried, condemned ; and a Commission was appointed for 
the trial of Mary herself. 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 345 

Once again the decisive evidence against Mary was contained in a 
single letter. Without one particular letter of the Casket group, the 
positive evidence of her guilt in the Kirk o' Field affair broke down. 
Without one particular letter, the positive evidence of her guilt in con- 
nection with the Babington Conspiracy broke down ; that is, there was 
no warrant for charging her with having actually given her sanction to 
assassination. In both cases the genuineness of the decisive document 
has been assailed. In neither case is it reasonably possible to maintain 
that the document was forged from beginning to end ; in both it is 
possible to believe that the damning passages were forged interpolations. 
But in the one case the difficulties of forgery were enormous, in the 
other they were small. Mary's denials may have been worthless, but 
they were explicit and not incompatible with the rest of the evidence. 
W T alsingham's answer to Mary's challenge was not explicit, "As I bear 
the place of a public person I have done nothing unworthy my place." 
There the matter stands and will stand till the Day of Judgment. No 
human being will ever know whether the technical evidence on which Mary 
was condemned to death was her genuine writing or a forgery. But of 
two things there can be no manner of doubt. Mary would have sanc- 
tioned and would have profited by Elizabeth's assassination without a 
qualm. Walsingham would have found some technical excuse for the 
destruction of the queen whose life, in common with three-fourths of 
the country, he regarded as an intolerable menace to the state. Whether 
he really discovered or invented it is a minor matter. Whether Mary 
was morally justified by Elizabeth's treatment in accepting any possible 
means for her owri liberation is beside the question. No person in Mary's 
position in Mary's day would have refused on moral grounds to coun- 
tenance Babington's plot ; and no government in Europe would have 
hesitated to remove a person who was in Mary's position. 

Mary was pronounced guilty, but her sentence was referred to parlia- 
ment and the queen. Parliament forthwith demanded her execution. 
Still Elizabeth hesitated. Possibly she had qualms of conscience, certainly 
she shrank from the idea of slaying a crowned queen, and feared the 
tongues of men. She tried to shift the responsibility. She hinted to 
Mary's custodians that they should relieve her of it by taking the law into 
their own hands — to their extreme indignation. But at last she was 
induced to sign the warrant for Mary's death, which was brought before 
her by the Secretary Davison. The Council acted without a moment's 
delay, fearing that the warrant would be revoked. Royal to the last, never 
more royal than in the hour of her death, Mary Stuart ended her long 
captivity. Whatever the faults or follies of the House of Stuart, its sons 
and daughters, with rare exceptions, have at least known how to die. 



346 



THE AGE OF TRANSITION 



III 

THE ARMADA 

By the death of Mary in February 1587 the situation was changed 
once more. The Romanists were without a candidate of their own faith 
who had any plausible title to the succession. The King of Scots was a 
Protestant ; the family of the Earl of Hertford, who had married Catherine 
Grey, were Protestants. But Philip of Spain, like the Guises, had adopted 
the doctrine that heresy was itself a bar to royalty. Of the few English 
Romanist nobles who claimed a Plantagenet ancestry, none would become 



Henry VIII. 

I 

(1) Mary. 

(2) Elizabeth. 

(3) Edward VI. 



DESCENDANTS OF HENRY VII. 

Henry VII. 



Margaret, 



(1) James IV. 
of Scotland. 

I 
James V. 

I 

Mary, Queen of 

Scots. 

I 

James VI. and I. 



(2) Angus. 

I 

Margaret, m. 
Matthew Stewart, 
Earl of Lennox. 



Darnley. Charles. 

I 

Arabella 

Stuart, 

m. William 

Seymour. 



Mary, m. Charles 

Brandon, Duke 

of Suffolk. 

I 

Frances, m. 

Henry Grey, 

Marquis of 

Dorset. 



Lady 
Jane Grey, 
m. Guildford 
Dudley. 



Catherine, m. 
Earl of Hertford. 

I 
Lord Beauchamp. 

I 
William Seymour. 



a candidate for the crown. But Philip himself, through both father and 
mother, was descended from daughters of John of Gaunt. Moreover Mary, 
having very naturally quarrelled with her son, who was not distinguished for 
filial piety — after all he was Darnley's son as well as Mary's — had chosen 
on her own account to declare Philip her heir. On this decidedly 
flimsy basis Philip put forth his own claim not only to succeed Elizabeth, 
but to supplant the heretic queen on the throne of England ; a claim which 
he transferred from himself to his daughter the Infanta Isabella. Nothing 
could have been more admirably calculated to ensure that wavering 
Romanists should choose patriotism in disregard of their allegiance to the 
papacy, since they were forced to make choice between the two. A 
popular error attributes to Elizabeth a magnanimous superiority to religious 
differences, and confidence in the loyalty of her Romanist subjects, because 
she chose the u Romanist " Lord Howard of Effingham to be admiral of 
the fleet in the great contest. Unfortunately, it is perfectly clear that 
Howard was not a Romanist at all. The English Catholics acted with a 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 347 

loyalty most honourable to them, but without any encouragement from 
the government. 

From the moment of Mary Stuart's death, however, it was manifest that 
a life and death struggle between England and Spain could not be deferred. 
Philip departed from his patient determination to grind the United Pro- 
vinces into complete submission before extinguishing the power of England. 
His ports were filled with preparations for a mighty armada. The able 
Spanish admiral Santa Cruz was to be in command — so far as any servant 
of Philip II. could regard himself as in command, for Philip trusted no 
man. But Drake did 
not wait for the Armada. 
As in 1586, so now, he 
sailed with a squadron 
to take the offensive, 
having slipped out of 
port in time to escape 
the counter - orders 
which he very accu- 
rately anticipated from 
the queen. He sailed 
to the great harbour of 
Cadiz, where he de- 
stroyed a vast quantity 
of shipping, completely 
spoiling the Armada's 
chance of sailing ,bef ore 
the winter ; and then, 
failing to entice the 
main Spanish fleet out of the Tagus, contented himself with capturing a 
great Spanish treasure-ship, and so returned home. 

It was Philip's intention to despatch an invincible fleet which would 
sail up the Channel, take on board from the Netherlands Parma's veteran 
regiments, and proceed to the conquest of England. But Drake's opera- 
tions of necessity postponed the sailing till the late autumn, and, when the 
late autumn came, Santa Cruz pronounced that winter storms would paralyse 
naval operations, even if they did not break up his fleet. With the new 
year Philip resolved to ignore his admiral's objections ; but Santa Cruz's 
own death again necessitated postponement, and by this time the English 
fleet was in full fighting trim. During the whole year past Elizabeth 
had been pursuing her own exasperating policy of intriguing with Parma 
on the basis of proposals for the betrayal of the Dutch, filling her own 
ministers and sailors with acute apprehension and disgust. Yet it may be 
that she was only playing for time, since when the crucial point in the 
negotiations was reached, she declared that she could not think of surrender- 
ing the cautionary towns which she held until full effect had been given to 




An English ship in the Armada fight. 
[From a contemporary engraving of one of the tapestries in the old House of Lords.] 



348 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

her own requirements ; whereas the surrender of the cautionary towns 
was from the Spanish point of view the necessary first step in the whole 
business. Every one appears to have believed that Elizabeth's negotiations 
were serious ; her ministers could only hope that they might be frustrated 
either by some fortunate accident or by Elizabeth's recovery of her moral 
equilibrium ; and as a matter of fact she extricated herself from the apparent 
impasse precisely as she had done half-a-dozen times before in similar cases. 
Philip, it may be remarked, went on patiently and laboriously as ever with 
his preparations, as though no negotiations had been in progress. 

When the Armada was all over, English piety attributed its defeat to 
the special interposition of Providence on behalf of the Protestant faith. 
" Dominus flavit et dissipati sunt," "the Lord blew and they were scattered." 
As a matter of fact, they were not scattered by tempests until they were 
thoroughly shattered and beaten by superior tactics, superior gunnery, 
superior seamanship, and superior naval construction. There was never 
a shadow of a doubt in the minds of the English seamen that, if they were 
allowed a fair chance, Philip's Armada would prove his ruin. If Drake had 
been given his way, the Armada would never have sailed at all, because it 
would have been sunk or burnt in detail in the Spanish ports or at least in 
Spanish waters. The alarms of the landsmen detained the English fleet 
in the narrow seas, and so the Armada had to be fought in force when it 
did come ; and even then, what surprised the seamen was not their ultimate 
success in destroying it, but the unexpected capacity for resistance which it 
displayed. 

The actual number of the English vessels which took some sort of part 
in the long series of engagements was somewhat greater than that of the 
Spaniards, but a large number of these were small boats which did not 
count in serious work. In tonnage, in men, and in guns, the Spaniards 
doubled the English. But the big ships were much harder to manceuvre, 
the English gunners could fire three shots to the Spaniards' one, and make 
every shot tell, while most of the Spaniards' were harmless. The men on 
board the English ships were nearly all sailors, who were working the ships 
themselves as fighting machines ; while half the men on the Spanish ships 
were soldiers who were of no use at all until the ships grappled, whereas 
the English never grappled until the enemy was already disabled. In plain 
terms, the end of the Armada was practically a foregone conclusion from 
the outset. The English made one grave miscalculation, which alone saved 
the Armada from total annihilation at their hands. They had not reckoned 
upon the enormous and wholly unprecedented expenditure of ammunition, 
of which the supplies ran short in both fleets, with the result that the 
English had to give up the pursuit when the Spaniards were already in 
helpless and headlong flight. 

The nucleus of the English fleet was the small but exceedingly efficient 
royal navy ; the majority of the vessels were privately owned or furnished 
by the seaports. The whole was under the general command of Lord 






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THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 349 

Howard of Effingham, with Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins as subordi- 
nates ; while Drake was the real head. The major part of the fleet was 
collected at Plymouth, while a squadron commanded by Wynter watched 
the Dutch ports to prevent any possibility of a surprise movement from 
that quarter. On July 19th the Armada was sighted off the Lizard, the 
ships massed in the form of a crescent. The English fleet had time to 
work out of Plymouth Sound, cross the front of the approaching foe, and 
lie to windward of the enemy's course so as to be able to attack or hold 
off at will. The Span- 
iards sailed in line 
abreast with a wide- 
spread front; the Eng- 
lish attacked sailing in 
line ahead, that is to say 
in single file, ship follow- 
ing ship, passing the 
Spaniards and pouring 
in broadsides as they 
passed ; while the Span- 
iards endeavoured to dis- 
able them by ineffective 
firing at their rigging. 

As the great fleet 
moved up Channel no 
attempt was at first 
made to bring on a 
general engagement, but 
stragglers were cut off 
and an occasional Span- 
iard was disabled. On 
the fourth day there was 
a sharper engagement 
off Portland, and an- 
other on the sixth day off the Isle of Wight. So far the Spaniards 
had kept their formation and actually lost very few ships, but the fight 
off Portsmouth prevented their apparent design of securing a station in 
the Channel, and they proceeded to Calais. As they lay there on the 
ninth night, the English, now reinforced by Wynter 's squadron, floated 
fire-ships down upon them before a favouring breeze. The Spaniards 
were seized with panic, cut their cables and made for the open sea. In 
the morning they were scattered far and wide. Off Gravelines the English 
fell upon them and destroyed them in detail. A fierce squall forced 
the English ships to draw off, and by the time it was over the Spaniards 
had begun their headlong flight up the North Sea. On the third day 
after Gravelines the pursuit ceased, partly from lack of ammunition, partly 




The defeat of the Armada. 
[From a broadside issued at the thanksgiving for the victory.] 



350 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

from the supposed necessity of guarding the Channel in force in case 
Parma should still attempt an invasion. Of the fleet which escaped from 
the English shattered and crippled, one half was lost on the Scottish or 
Irish coasts, or foundered at sea. Only a battered and ruined remnant 
struggled home. In the whole series of engagements the English had lost 
one ship and less than a hundred men. 



IV 



AFTER THE ARMADA 



What would have happened if the Spaniards had crippled the English 
fleet without getting crippled themselves ? They would have convoyed to 

the English shores from the Netherlands 
an army of invasion consisting partly of 
Parma's veterans, partly of the large rein- 
forcements which the Armada was carrying 
from Spain, under the command of the 
ablest soldier living. They would have 
found awaiting them the English levies 
gathered at Tilbury, commanded nominally 
by the incompetent Leicester, but probably 
in actual fact by the experienced captain, 
Sir John Norreys ; an army enthusiastic 
but untrained, though containing a leaven 
of men who had seen hard fighting as 
volunteers in the Low Countries, in the 
French Huguenot wars, and in Ireland. 
Parma's task would not have been an easy 
one, but the possibility that there would 
have been a Spanish conquest of England 
cannot be denied. After the defeat of the 
Armada, however, no invasion was possible, and had it been possible, the 
invading force would have been isolated in England, completely cut off 
from supplies or reinforcements. As matters stood, the dominion of the 
seas, hitherto claimed by Spain, had passed completely out of her hands, 
and the destruction of the Armada secured the deliverance of the United 
Provinces as well as that of England herself. From that time forward, 
Spaniards and Englishmen met on the seas with a perfect confidence that 
if the Spaniards were only three to one they had no chance of victory. 

The fear of Spain had passed. England was no longer on the defensive. 
The party of aggression would have set themselves to the annihilation of the 
Spanish power, the complete destruction of Spanish fleets, the seizure of 
the Spanish dominion in America, the separation of Spain from Portugal, 




Queen Elizabeth in her Armada Thanks- 
giving robes. 
[From a miniature executed in 1616.] 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 351 

whose crown Philip had appropriated eight years before, claiming through his 
mother Isabella, the sister of the two last kings, both of whom died childless. 
To that party belonged Drake among the seamen, Walsingham among 
statesmen, and Walter Raleigh, who was courtier, statesman, soldier, and 
seaman by turns. But Elizabeth and Burleigh were not of the party of 
aggression. Politically, they did not desire the destruction of Spain, fearing 
the aggrandisement of France thereby. Nor were they moved, like Raleigh, 
by great conceptions of England's expansion in America. They wanted a 
Spain powerless to hurt England directly, but able to serve as a counterpoise 
to France. Burleigh had strong Protestant sympathies, but they were 
subordinated to his ideas of political expediency. Elizabeth had no 
Protestant sympathies, and only championed Protestantism with reluctance 
and for exclusively political ends. The majority of the nation at large did 
not look beyond making the maximum of personal profit out of the 
weakness of Spain. Spain was to be smitten hip and thigh, and the 
Egyptians were to be thoroughly spoiled ; but their spoiling, not their 
destruction, was the end in view, though there was no desire to preserve 
them from destruction. 

Elizabeth perceived that she could give rein to this popular demand 
without detriment to her own policy. But Drake was the hero of the 
hour, and there must be an appearance of giving Drake his way. In the 
process the now inconvenient admiral should be discredited ; and she 
would be able to carry out her own plan of continuing to humble Spain 
without reducing her to entire impotence. A better title than Philip's own 
to Portugal was possessed by his cousins of the house of Braganza. A 
more useful pretender, however, was found in the person of an illegitimate 
cousin known as Don Antonio. The aggressive school saw the chance of 
dealing a heavy blow to Spain by setting Don Antonio on the throne of 
Portugal. With this end in view Drake was sent forth on his ill-starred 
Lisbon expedition. We need not accuse Elizabeth of deliberately planning 
to ruin that venture ; but she did in fact so interfere with and modify 
Drake's own scheme of operations that the expedition entirely failed of its 
object. It was indeed demonstrated that Spain was open to attack on her 
own soil. Corunna and Vigo were very severely handled, and a number 
of store ships were captured. But the attack on Lisbon failed, several 
ships were lost in a storm, and Drake returned home with a damaged repu- 
tation — though the blame did not really rest on his shoulders — which made 
it comparatively easy' to displace his naval policy by that of his only less 
famous cousin, John Hawkins. That great seaman was content with 
merely applying on a big scale the old principles of his private feud with 
the Spaniards. English squadrons sallied forth to lie in wait on the trade 
routes for Spanish ships and fleets laden with treasure or merchandise, 
without devoting themselves to any persistent destruction of the arsenals 
and warships by the construction of which Philip hoped to redress the 
balance. 



352 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

The policy was satisfactory enough to English adventurers, who had a 
free hand to raid Spanish commerce, and to it we owe that famous sea 
fight which stands beside the battle of Thermopylae and the charge of 
Balaclava in its glorious futility. Futility, that is, as concerns tangible 
results ; for the moral effect of such deeds is not to be measured. Sir 
Richard Grenville on the Revenge, Drake's ship when the Armada came, 
was with a small English squadron off the Azores, awaiting a Spanish 
treasure-fleet, when news came of the approach of fifty-three Spanish war- 
ships — an illustration, by the way, of the stolid determination with which 
Philip set about the reconstruction of the Spanish navy. Grenville deliber- 
ately allowed his own ship to be cut off by the great Spanish fleet, which 
he then fought single-handed for fifteen hours. The issue of such a fight 
could of course never have been in question. But it taught Englishmen, 
though they hardly needed the lesson, that to consider the odds against 
them when they fought the Spaniards was almost superfluous. 

The fact however remained that, while English raiding crippled Spanish 
commerce and diverted quantities of treasure from Spain to England, Spain 
was stolidly reconstructing and reorganising her navy. Philip's chances 
would have been better if he had devoted himself with a single mind to 
this object, and to the completion of the conquest of the Netherlands. 
But Parma was perpetually crippled by want of supplies, besides being 
hampered by being called upon at critical moments to turn aside and 
intervene in France. There Henry III. had first tried to rid himself of the 
Guise domination by assassinating the Duke of Guise, and had then him- 
self been assassinated, leaving the Holy League and Henry of Navarre to 
fight out their quarrel. Elizabeth lent Henry occasional assistance, just 
as in the past she had helped William of Orange. Philip allied himself 
with the Guises ; and his daughter Isabella, niece of the last three French 
kings, was put forward as the true, because the orthodox, heir to the 
throne. Henry IV. was able to pose as a patriot, and to accuse the Guise 
faction of aiming at the subjection of France to Spanish control. But the 
scale was decisively turned in his favour when he formally reconciled him- 
self to the Church of Rome while still asserting the principles of religious 
toleration. 

The signs of Spanish recovery, however, were sufficiently ominous to in- 
duce Elizabeth to give the more aggressive war party a freer rein. Drake 
and Hawkins were despatched on an expedition to the West Indies, there 
to discover that the Spaniards had learnt many lessons since Drake's last 
visit to those regions. Not much was effected, and both the great seamen 
died before the expedition returned home. But in the following year, 
1596, a severe blow was struck when a force under command of Lord 
Howard, the Queen's latest favourite the Earl of Essex, and Walter Raleigh, 
fell upon the port of Cadiz, sank or burnt a vast quantity of shipping, and 
extracted a substantial ransom from Cadiz itself. Even after this, later in 
the year, Philip was able to despatch a new Armada, though it was actually 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 



353 



shattered by winds and waves and was never subjected to the tender 
mercies of the English seamen. 

In 1598 both Philip of Spain and Lord Burleigh died, almost at 
the moment when a general European peace was restored by the treaty 
of Vervins. Walsingham had preceded them by nine years. Elizabeth 
had been fortunate in her great antagonist and 
doubly fortunate in her ministers. For forty 
years Philip had dominated Europe. When he 
came to the throne, Spain and the Netherlands 
were his, much of Italy, the inheritance of the 
New World, the lordship of the seas. The one 
recognised maritime rival was Portugal, and in 
the course of his reign he absorbed Portugal 
and the Portuguese empire under his own sway. 
He made pretension to the Crown of England ; 
for his daughter, the child of a French princess, 
he made pretension to the Crown of France. 
He was the avowed champion of the Church 
against heretics, though he was by no means 
ready to recognise the authority of the Pope over 
himself. For forty years Philip's shadow lay 
upon Europe ; but during the last ten years of 
his life, though he never knew it himself, the 
substance of his dominion had passed from him. 
The most patient, the most industrious, the most 
obstinate, and the most ambitious of men, he 
trusted no man ; and by his distrust he spoilt 
the work of every man who served him. He 
conceived of himself as a sort of Fate, moving 
slowly, steadily, irresistibly, grinding to powder 
his own foes and the foes of his faith ; a Fate 
which would smite in its own good time. Un- 
fortunately for Philip, he always deferred the 
moment for striking till it was too late. He 
could never grasp the possibility that his in- 
tended victim might strike first and do so with tFrom an effigy s ^ ff Sf ] ntham Church « 
effect. Self-confidence is a supremely valuable 

quality when it is not misplaced ; when it is misplaced it is apt to prove 
fatal. 

In caution, in patience, and in industry, Philip was matched by Lord 
Burleigh, whose main defect as a statesman was a prosaic lack of idealism, 
which, as well as a still more penetrating intelligence, was supplied by 
his colleague Walsingham. The conjunction of those two great men 
. was precisely what was needed to counteract and supplement the erratic 
ingenuity and selfwill of their mistress, to show her the path she ought 

Z, 




Elizabethan armour. 



354 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

to tread — and always at the critical moment did tread, though not as 
a rule until her capriciousness had driven both of them to the verge of 
despair. They were the pilots who steered the ship of state, or rather 
the navigators who set the course which the actual pilot, the queen, 
followed after her own devious fashion, evading by the merest hair's breadth 
the rocks and shoals of which they warned her. The passage had already 

been accomplished when Walsingham 
passed to his grave ; one whose loyal 
service to England left him a poor 
man at the last. Burleigh was already 
not far short of seventy when the 
Armada came, and his personal activity 
was less in the last years of his life. 

Younger men were coming to the 
front: Burleigh's second son Robert, 
the heir of his policy ; the brilliant 
but little trusted Raleigh ; Essex, showy 
but unbalanced, the queen's personal 
favourite, though her reliance was re- 
posed rather on the younger Cecil. 
Less prominent, but intellectually above 
them all, even above Raleigh, was 
Francis Bacon, Burleigh's nephew by 
marriage, son of the Lord Keeper 
Nicholas Bacon who, through the first 
half of the reign, had been one of the pillars of Elizabeth's government. 
These were the men who played the leading parts in the last wintry years of 
the great queen's life, when her own contemporaries, the men who most had 
helped to make her great, had passed before and left her in dreary solitude. 




Sir Walter Raleigh. 



V 



SCOTLAND 



While England was waging her great struggle with Spain, James VI. in 
Scotland was becoming an adept in the arts of what he was pleased to call 
"king-craft." When Morton resigned the regency in 1578 the boy was 
not yet twelve years old. Morton owed his power to the fact that he was 
very much the ablest and one of the least scrupulous among the Scottish 
nobility. He represented that school of statesmen which for some forty 
years past had definitely regarded union with England on satisfactory terms 
for Scotland as the goal to be aimed at. In common with Moray and 
Maitland of Lethington, he believed that that goal was to be achieved on 
the basis of the common Protestantism of the two nations, though Maitland's 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 355 

tortuous mind had led him in his last days to seek the union through the 
restoration of Queen Mary. But Morton's Protestantism was of a political 
and Erastian character ; that is to say, religion in his view was entirely 
subordinate to politics, whereas the Scottish preachers, from John Knox 
downwards, treated politics as subordinate to religion ; they looked upon 
secular policy as a means to establishing their own conception of a theo- 
cracy, which meant in effect government by the clergy, who were to stand 
to the civil power as Samuel stood to Saul. The mantle of John Knox, 
who died in 1572, had fallen upon the shoulders of Andrew Melville, who 
was as rigidly uncompromising in his 
demands for clerical supremacy as a 
Gregory, an Innocent, or a Boniface. 
But Morton was stronger than the 
preachers, and he forced upon the 
reluctant Calvinists the semblance of 
an episcopal organisation of the Church. 
His bishops, however, existed merely 
that their official revenues might be 
transferred to the coffers of others, 
whereby they were given the mocking 
nick-name of "Tulchan" Bishops — the 
tulchan being a dummy calf which facili- 
tated the process of extracting milk 
from reluctant kine ; the Church in 
this case being Morton's milch cow. 

Morton's power was broken by 
the appearance in Scotland of Esme 
Stuart, who was made Duke of Lennox, 
and of another James Stewart, not a 
member of the royal family at all, who acquired an ascendency over the 
mind of the boy king and was raised to the vacant earldom of Arran. 
Arran and Lennox, acting in conjunction, destroyed Morton; who was 
executed on the charge of complicity in Darnley's murder. On this there 
followed a duel between the Romanising Lennox and Arran on one side, 
and on the other the preachers, who relied upon what was then the most 
representative body in Scotland — not the parliament, but the General 
Assembly of the Church, a gathering of laymen as well as of clergy. The 
General Assembly in' 1581 succeeded in definitely introducing a Presby- 
terian organisation, based upon that of the French Huguenots, into the 
Church of Scotland. This was only a beginning ; for Lennox and Arran 
still retained their ascendency over the king. But among the magnates, 
though in general they had no love for the preachers, there was a party 
which had still less love for Lennox. A "band" between them brought 
about what was called the Raid of Ruthven, the conspirators capturing 
the person of the young king. The capture checkmated Lennox, who 




James Douglas, Earl of Morton, Regent 
of Scotland, 1572-1578. 



356 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

was obliged to leave the country and died soon after ; but Arran still 
remained ; and in 1583 James escaped from his captors and Arran once 
more ruled the country, from which the nobles who had shared in the 
Ruthven raid were expelled. 

A Scottish parliament at this time was not unlike an English parliament 
when the War of the Roses was going on ; that is, it was usually attended 
only by the supporters of the existing government, who carried out the 
behests of their leaders. So the Scottish parliament of 1584 repressed the 
preachers. It declared General Assemblies to be illegal except when they 
met under the royal authority, and it reconstituted an episcopate appointed 
by the Crown, through whom the Crown would be able to control the 
Church. Just after this, however, Elizabeth was forced to commit herself 
to the war with Spain and to a more aggressive championship of Pro- 
testantism. As matters stood she regarded the banished lords with more 
favour than Arran. Pressure from her brought about the restoration of 
the exiles and the fall of Arran from power. 

The result was a government passable though not too efficient, suffi- 
ciently subservient to Elizabeth to content itself with feeble protests when 
the captive Queen of Scots was put to death. The most prominent events 
were still those which marked a victory either for the preachers or for the 
king in the contest for effective supremacy. The parliament of 1592 
reversed the proceedings of that of 1584, and promulgated the Presbyterian 
constitution of the Scottish Church. The contest between Presbyterianism 
and Episcopacy was not on the face of it a question of theology but of 
Church government, although the one system attracted Calvinists, and the 
other Anglicans whose doctrines were less antagonistic to those of Rome. 
The Presbytery was Democratic in its structure and was a complete de- 
parture from the old organisation. Episcopacy preserved the old organisa- 
tion in a slightly modified form, but when separated from allegiance to the 
papacy became inevitably allied with the monarchy. Hence both in 
England and in Scotland the Crown was antagonistic to Presbyterianism. 
Episcopacy, the effective control of the Church through bishops nominated 
by the Crown, requires no explanation for English readers ; but in England 
Presbyterianism, after the Stuart restoration in 1660, fell into such a 
subordinate position that the system which triumphed north of the Tweed 
is not commonly understood in the southern country, although there was a 
time when there also it came near to capturing the establishment. 

The Presbyterian system is pyramidal. The constitution obtained 
in Scotland in 1592 made the base of the pyramid the Kirk Session, the 
governing body of each parish or congregation, consisting of the minister 
and presbyters or " elders " appointed by the congregation. Next came 
the Presbytery or assembly of the ministers and elders of a group of 
congregations. Then came the Synod, or assembly of a group of Presby- 
teries ; and finally, the General Assembly of the Church, the ultimate 
controlling authority. But in the General Assembly the Crown was also 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 357 

to be represented either by the king in person or by a commissioner. The 
fundamental fact however remained, that the General Assembly was very 
thoroughly representative of popular feeling, while it considered itself 
warranted in dealing with all which could conceivably be regarded as 
entering the sphere of religion. Moreover within each congregation and 
each larger or smaller group of congregations the different bodies from 
the Kirk Sessions upwards possessed, in the name of ecclesiastical discipline, 
very extensive powers of interference with and control over the private 
life and conduct of every individual. 

To the king himself such a system was intolerable. It made every 
minister the most powerful man in his own parish. It did not, like the 
Church as conceived by Hildebrand, claim from National Churches allegiance 
to a foreign potentate of higher authority than their own temporal rulers ; 
but in effect it claimed that higher authority for the ministers of the 
National Church itself, collectively and individually. The position was 
expressed by Andrew Melville when he told King James that the King 
of Scotland was God's "silly" (that is, weak) "vassal," to be obeyed only 
as an official of his Divine Sovereign of Whose will the ministers were 
the interpreters. 

But the lay magnates of the country were as little disposed as the 
king to be held in bondage under the preachers. The General Assembly, 
representative though it was, had not the secular authority of parliament, 
in which the Church was not represented. An arrangement was now 
made by which fifty-one representatives of the Church, nominated partly 
by the Crown and partly by the Church, should sit and vote in parliament ; 
and the Estates also pronounced that if the king should nominate bishops, 
they should sit of right in parliament as in the past. The next step was 
the transfer to the king of the exclusive right of nominating the Church 
representatives, although he could only select them from lists submitted 
to him. And finally, in virtue of the powers granted by the Estates, James 
in 1600 actually appointed three bishops, of Ross, Aberdeen, and Caithness. 
The wedge was fairly inserted for the complete restoration of the 
Episcopate. 

VI 

WINTER 

The last years of Elizabeth's reign are occupied largely by the an- 
tagonisms and intrigues of rival politicians and parties and possible candi- 
dates for the throne. Most prominent is the tragedy of the Earl of Essex, 
and the story of Essex is inextricably bound up with that of Ireland. The 
scene yields no great actors ; for even the men who had in them real 
elements of greatness, Raleigh and Bacon, played parts which were far from 
being great. In Europe two men stand out far above their contemporaries, 



358 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Henry IV. of France and Maurice of Nassau, the son of William of Orange, 
a worthy successor of his father in the leadership of the United Provinces. 
But these two enter little into specifically English history. 

Elizabeth until her last hour would never definitely acknowledge any 
particular person as her successor. So far as legitimacy was concerned, 
there was no possibility of questioning the title of James VI. of Scotland; 
but political reasons were likely to weigh more than mere legitimacy. The 

Greys were represented 
by Lord Beauchamp, 
son of Catherine Grey 
and the Earl of Hert- 
ford, and by his son 
William Seymour. 
Margaret Tudor was re- 
presented not only by 
James VI. but by her 
great-granddaughter, 
Arabella Stuart of the 
house of Lennox. The 
line of the Poles, de- 
scending from George 
Duke of Clarence, was 
represented by the Earl 
of Huntingdon. And 
the ultra-Romanists at 
least fixed their hopes 
on Isabella of Spain, 
the sister of the reign- 
ing King Philip III. 
Nor was Isabella now an 
entirely impossible can- 
didate,because Philip II. 
had conferred upon her the sovereignty of the Netherlands, parting it 
from the Spanish monarchy. Isabella of Burgundy, with an Austrian 
archduke for a husband, might mean, not the subjection of England to 
Spanish control, but the union of England with an independent Burgundy, 
in which quite conceivably the United Provinces might be included. 
Isabella's claim rested on the fact that she was the only pronounced 
Catholic with Plantagenet blood in her veins who was a candidate at all. 

There were many of the English, especially among the nobility, with 
leanings to the old religion, and in common with many of the professed 
Romanists they might be expected to accept with equal readiness a Roman 
Catholic ruler pledged to tolerate Anglicanism or a Protestant ruler pledged 
to tolerate Romanism. Hence there was a very wide field for plotting and 
counter-plotting, especially in view of the possibility of a marriage between 




Robert Cecil. 
[From the engraving by Elstrak.] 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 359 

Arabella Stuart and either Lord Beauchamp or his son. Of the English 
plotters, by far the most subtle was Robert Cecil, who intrigued with all 
parties, but with the ultimate intention of securing the throne for James VI. 
and recognition for himself as the man to whom the Scots king owed the 
success of his candidature. Incidentally it was of primary importance to 
Cecil to ruin his leading rival, the Earl of Essex, who was identified with 
the anti-Spanish war-party and the more aggressive Protestants, and was 
bound to champion the cause of James VI., although the Romanists cherished 
vain hopes that either James or Arabella Stuart might be won over to their 
own cause. We must be content with this indication of the nature of the 
plotting and counter-plotting that went on, without attempting the long task 
of unravelling the intricate details. 

The ruin of Essex was accomplished through Ireland. Power of 
resistance in that unhappy country had been broken by the Smerwick 
campaign and the subsequent merciless treatment of the Irish. The north 
had not taken part, however, in Desmond's rebellion ; the O'Neills in Ulster 
and the O'Donnells of Tyrconnel, in the north-west, had remained loyal ; 
Hugh O'Neill, the young Earl of Tyrone, had enjoyed an English training 
and was a professed supporter of English rule. In the south Ormond was 
at least convinced that English tyranny was preferable to the wild anarchy 
which seemed the only alternative. But Tyrone was not content ; and he 
brought to bear upon the problem a subtlety of brain and a power of 
organisation unprecedented among the Irish leaders. 

The Armada came and passed without stirring up any movement in 
Ireland ; but not long afterwards the north-west was again in a state of 
ferment. The government, always kept with insufficient funds, except at 
the moment of some supreme crisis, could only deal with the insurgents 
after the usual ineffective fashion. Tyrone posed as the pacificator, exerting 
his influence to quiet the disturbances ; his attitude and all his overt 
actions were irreproachably loyal ; yet the English officials were convinced 
that he was merely masking disloyal intrigues. In fact, five years after 
the Armada, he was in communication with Philip of Spain, and Ireland 
was at least in part the objective of that second Armada of Philip's which 
collapsed so ignominiously in 1596. Yet, whatever Tyrone had been doing, 
nothing could be brought home to him ; and after this demonstration of 
the futility of trusting to Spain, he succeeded in making his peace with the 
English government, while he continued to weave his intrigues and to 
organise his own effective ascendency. In 1598 the English government 
resolved to deal with him with a strong hand, but only to meet with a 
disastrous defeat on the Blackwater near Armagh. Still Tyrone did not 
follow up his victory, though if he had done so half Ireland would probably 
have risen. He still chose to maintain his professions of loyalty, and to 
declare that the misguided government was attacking an innocent man. 

This was the situation which brought about the downfall of Essex. He 
clamoured at the council-board against the inefficiency of the Irish 



360 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

administration ; his tirades were answered by the offer of the deputyship 
for himself. He declared himself ready to undertake the task of bringing 
Ireland to order upon conditions — conditions which would place under his 
control a force dangerously large for a man of overweening ambition. The 
conditions were granted, and he departed to Ireland. But Essex in Ireland 
could not exercise his personal fascination upon the queen. His absence 
left the field clear to his antagonists, and his own proceedings in Ireland 
did not improve his position. He exceeded even the exceptionally full 
powers which had been conferred on him, acting in direct defiance of 
instructions, and wrote violent letters of complaint at the treatment which 
he was receiving. He paraded through Ireland instead of marching in 
force against Tyrone ; and when at last peremptory orders did compel him 
to march, he negotiated and made terms instead of striking, and, to the 
consternation of his supporters in England, retired without a blow. What 
actually passed is unknown ; but, on the whole, the presumption is that he 
made a private bargain with Tyrone, which was to secure the succession of 
James VI. in England and the ascendency of the two earls in England and 
Ireland respectively. 

The outraged queen expressed her resentment against her favourite in 
unmeasured terms ; whereupon in a moment of madness he threw up his 
post, hurried to England, rode post-haste to Greenwich, and flung himself 
in most unseemly guise into the presence of his royal mistress, trusting to 
recover his ascendency with her. But the outrage was too gross. The 
queen banished him from her presence, and the same day he was arrested 
and placed in prison. 

For nearly a year Essex was kept in ward, while Tyrone in Ireland 
opened fresh communications with Philip III., and the game of intrigue went 
merrily forward in England, always to the advantage of Cecil. Essex on his 
release found himself powerless, and made frantic efforts to recover ground 
as a popular champion and a patriot, to the entire satisfaction of his rival. 
When he had been given sufficient rope, Cecil struck. Essex was summoned 
to appear before the Council. The earl made a desperate attempt to appeal 
to the London mob, which failed completely. He was arrested, tried for 
treason before his peers, and executed. Passionately as Elizabeth was 
attached to him, pardon was impossible ; but, with his death, all happiness 
went out of the old queen's life. 

Montjoy, an able commander, was sent to take the place of Essex 
in Ireland ; but even the exceptionally large forces placed at his disposal 
did not suffice him to make an immediate end of Tyrone. Philip III. of Spain 
made a last effort, and the insurgents in the south were reinforced by troops 
from Spain. Here, however, Montjoy succeeded in crushing the enemy 
before Tyrone could come to their assistance. Of the insurgent chiefs, 
some were captured and others fled the country. Tyrone displayed his 
own diplomatic abilities by making satisfactory terms for himself, and the 
rebellion was at an end. 



THE DAY OF TRIUMPH 361 

With the fall of Essex, Cecil's most dangerous rival had vanished. 
Raleigh, with all his abilities, was better skilled in making enemies than 
friends, in politics at least. Elizabeth never trusted him, and he lacked both 
the craft and the self-control which distinguished the son of Lord Burleigh. 
That astute politician knew exactly what every one was doing or trying to 
do, and half the plotters looked to him for a lead while he manipulated the 
game to suit his own ends. When Elizabeth was stricken down with mortal 
illness, all his plans were in perfect order for securing the succession of James 
the moment the throne should be vacant. Troops and fleets were under the 
command of his partisans ; virtually none but adherents of his own had 
access to the dying queen. Only at the very last, when speech had actually 
left her, the spectators averred that she signed her acquiescence, when asked 
if she recognised James as her heir. No one was ready to come forward 



lis* 3tT<dlJ(a>J rt< am OutYti J*pvp*- 




The funeral hearse of Queen Elizabeth. 



Gcvtfrnm JytnhcjitrSf 



[Taken from a contemporary drawing of the funeral ceremonies by William Camden, Clarencieux King-at-Arms.] 

on the spot as champion of any of the rival candidates ; and no hand or 
voice was raised in opposition when James VI. of Scotland was proclaimed 
James I. of England. Cecil had won, and there was no question at all that 
he would be all-powerful with the new monarch. 

Mournful was the deathbed of the great queen, the most triumphant of 
all English rulers ; mournful, because her own delight in life had departed 
from her, and of all those who still flattered her and bowed to her imperious 
will there was none who loved her, none whom she loved. In the heart of 
the nation she has been enshrined as "Good Queen Bess," the princess who 
flung defiance at the might of Spain and raised England to the highest 
pinnacle of power, the queen in whose reign English seamen won for 
England her proud position as mistress of the seas, and English poets 
matched the triumphs of the Athenian stage. What England owes to the 
Elizabethan age, Englishmen feel that they owe to Elizabeth herself. All 
other personalities are dominated by hers. And yet it is one of the most 



362 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

amazing of paradoxes that such a woman as Elizabeth should stand out 
emphatically as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all English 
monarchs. Trickery was the breath of her nostrils ; an insatiable vanity, 
for which no flattery was too grotesque, was, superficially, her most 
prominent characteristic. She deliberately assumed her right to display, in 
an exaggerated degree, every foible which the misogynist attributes to her sex. 
She was as ready to make a scapegoat of the innocent as her father before 
her ; her treatment of Davison the Secretary, who obtained her signature to 
Mary Stuart's death warrant, was not less base than Henry's treatment of 
Wolsey and Cromwell. And yet her greatness remains. Beneath the 
trickery and meanness and vanity lay a deep-rooted love of her country ; 
a mighty resolve to make that country great. Perhaps she never loved any 
man save Essex, the darling of her old age ; but she loved her people. And 
behind the mask of feminine caprice there worked a brain, cold, calculating, 
unemotional, which gauged chances to a hair's breadth, knew exactly how 
far it was safe to go on any particular course, never failed to provide a 
means of escape from every apparent impasse. " Dux femina facti " was the 
legend on the medals to commemorate the Armada. " Under a woman's 
captaincy," England won for ever her place among the nations. 



CHAPTER XIV 
UNDER THE TUDORS 

I 

THE STATE 

BROADLY speaking, the Tudor period falls into two parts, the pre-Elizabethan 
and the Elizabethan. The first is a time of transition, partly constructive 
but mainly destructive. The second is a time of reconstruction. On the 
ruin of the baronage, completed by the earlier Tudors, the monarchy took 
a new shape perfected under Elizabeth. On the ruin of the old ecclesiasti- 
cal system accomplished under her predecessors, Elizabeth constructed a 
new ecclesiastical system. Out of the rural and commercial revolution 
which had been in progress for seventy years, the Elizabethans built up a 
new industrial social order. Out of the maritime activity of the first period 
arose the maritime supremacy which was established and the oceanic com- 
merce which was inaugurated in the second ; and from the revival of 
intellectual activity which practically began in the reign of Henry VII. burst 
the blaze of -literary splendour which glorified the closing years of the 
period. The narrative has enabled us only in part to watch these move- 
ments, which will now demand our closer attention. 

Through the medieval period the power of the Crown was limited in 
various degrees by three forces : the fear of excommunication by the 
Church, the danger of armed coercion by the baronage, and, as the expenses 
of government grew, the power of the Commons to withhold supplies. 
Arbitrary action by the Crown — action, that is, which did not clearly rest 
upon precedent — was invariably challenged by the application of one or 
other of these forces, unless the approval of the three estates had first been 
secured ; and these three estates or parliament obtained an effective 
control over legislation and a degree of control over administration. 

Of the three forces, the fear of ecclesiastical censure was habitually of 
least account ; but it could not be altogether ignored, as King John in 
particular found to his cost. It remained, however, for Henry VIII. to bid 
successful defiance to the thunders of the Church and to destroy its 
capacity for hampering the action of the Crown. 

The War of the Roses broke up the second limiting force. When 
- Henry VII. took possession of the Crown the remnant of the old baronage, to- 
gether with the new baronage, were no longer able to make head against the 

3 6 3 



364 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

monarchy. The complete subversion of the baronial power was decisively 
demonstrated when the peers unanimously condemned the Duke of 
Buckingham, the greatest noble in the realm, at the implied behest of 
King Henry VIII., in spite of the absence of any evidence that he was 
cherishing treasonable designs. The demonstration was repeated at 
intervals throughout the reign ; the nobility at all times showed an entire 

subservience to the 
Crown, as they also 
did in the reign of 
Queen Mary. Apart 
from Northumber- 
land's abortive con- 
spiracy, which was 
formulated with the 
sanction of the reign- 
ing king, and from 
the rising in the north 
in 1569, every revolt 
during the sixteenth 
century was a rising 
not of the barons but 
of the commons. In 
that year the revolt of 
the northern earls was 
the last futile attempt 
at coercing govern- 
ment by a baronial 
insurrection. The de- 
pression of the nobility 
was effected partly by 
the enforcement of 
the laws against main- 
tenance and livery 
through courts which 




Armour presented to Henry VIII. by the Emperor Maximilian. 
[In the Tower of London.] 



were not amenable to coercion, partly by systematic fines and confiscations, 
partly by the merciless application of the laws against treason, reinforced 
by the Treasons Act of Thomas Cromwell. 

There remained the third force, the power of the Commons to cut 
off the supplies. The time had gone by when a king could attempt to 
act except under colour of law. The Crown could not emancipate itself 
from such control as the Commons possessed, so long as it was dependent 
on the goodwill of the Commons for the supplies necessary for carrying 
out its policy. The ingenuity of Henry VII. almost attained the desired 
end by the accumulation of a hoard which made appeals to the Commons 
for financial assistance superfluous. But the extravagance of his son 



UNDER THE TUDORS 365 

dissipated the hoard ; and in the course of the French war he and his 
minister Wolsey were quite emphatically taught that a policy opposed 
by the popular will was impracticable if it involved heavy expenditure. 
There was no battle for the principle that the Commons had a right to 
direct policy ; there was merely a demonstration that in practice an 
expensive policy required the acquiescence of parliament. Cromwell tried 
to effect an emancipation by sweeping the vast wealth of the Church 
into the Treasury ; but the intention was frustrated again by the reckless 
dissipation of the wealth acquired by the spoliation. In Henry's last 
years, the Crown, to 
avoid appeals for in- 
tolerable taxation, was 
driven to the miser- 
able expedient of de- 
basing the currency 
and repudiating debts. 
By the time of Eliza- 
beth's accession the 
Crown was as depen- 
dent as it had ever 
been on the goodwill 
of the Commons. 
There was no new 
mine of wealth to re- 
place the hoards of 
Henry VII. or the 
spoils of the monas- 
teries, nor had the 
Crown succeeded in 
asserting any fresh 
claim to impose taxa- 
tion on its own authority, except for some slight alterations in the customs 
duties which were made in Mary's reign without exciting protest. 

Subserviency, it may be said, would have served the purposes of the 
monarchy as well as goodwill ; and we are told that the Tudor parliaments 
were subservient. That is a view hardly warranted by the facts. Within 
certain limits the Commons could be relied upon to carry out the wishes 
of the Crown. The nobility were beyond question subservient, and great 
nobles controlled the return of a good many members of the Commons' 
House. Mary too erected into boroughs sundry towns where local senti- 
ment supported her views, just as afterwards Elizabeth created boroughs 
in the south-west country where her own nominees were secure. Much 
energy was occasionally expended on the packing of parliament, but 
not always with success. Constituencies occasionally refused point-blank 
to accept the nominees sent down by the agents of the Crown. Mary's 




The Harry Grace a Dieti, built by Henry VIII. in 15 1 3. 
[From a drawing in the Pepysian Library, Cambridge.] 



366 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

parliament in the spring of 1554 stopped very far short of endorsing 
the programme laid before it. When Henry VIII. intended to proceed 
against Thomas More by bill of attainder, he was wise in time and with- 
drew More's name from the bill in the face of unmistakable indications 
that otherwise if it were pressed forward it would be thrown out. The 
Reformation parliament itself rejected the Bill of Wards in spite of 
blustering threats on Henry's part. The House of Commons refused to 
discuss a money bill at all until Cardinal Wolsey withdrew from the 
precincts. The right to the utmost freedom of debate was cherished and 
exercised. When their pockets were touched at least, Tudor parliaments 
quite refused to be browbeaten. Even when money was not in question, 
Tudor governments did not impose legislation to which they compelled 
assent ; they could only do their best or worst by packing or otherwise 
to secure a house which was likely to support the measures they intended 




An Elizabethan family. 
[From a brass of 1584. ] 

to introduce. And they could not secure such parliaments unless there 
was a very substantial body of popular feeling in their favour. 

The Tudors, then, did not tyrannise over their parliaments, but on the 
other hand the parliaments did not assert new claims to control. They 
asserted successfully the right to discuss with entire freedom questions of 
policy, questions of administration, questions of religion, personal questions 
such as royal marriages, the right to petition the Crown, to exhibit grievances, 
to recommend measures, to refuse measures submitted to them, to control 
supply absolutely. But they did not claim the right to dictate policy. 
They claimed only the veto in the last resort through the refusal of supply ; 
but this was an extreme measure, to be called into play only when there 
was a point-blank collision between the will of the Crown and the wish of 
parliament. Such a collision the Tudors were always wise enough to 
avoid ; being happily endowed with a singular skill in retiring gracefully 
from an untenable position, and with an unfailing capacity for recognising 
the moment when a position had become untenable. Elizabeth frequently 
resented the freedom claimed by her parliaments, and rated them furiously 



UNDER THE TUDORS 367 

for discussing matters which were no concern of theirs ; but they went on 
with their discussions ; and if, as seldom happened until the very end of 
her life, she found herself arousing a real resentment, she was a consum- 
mate mistress of the art of beating a retreat. As a rule, however, the 
Commons were content to express their opinion and leave her to go her 
own way, which she was always careful in the long run to keep sufficiently 
in harmony with their wishes. 

So long as harmony prevailed this was a sound working system. The 
brief triumph of legalised absolutism, when an Act of parliament practically 
bestowed on Henry VIII. unlimited powers, would at once have become 
intolerable if the Crown had employed those powers so as to arouse popular 
resentment. The Royal Proclamations Act was cancelled in the next reign. 
The system under Elizabeth was essentially one of partnership, in which 
the queen was the senior partner and manager, and parliament was the 
junior partner and critic. But a partnership must mean a divided authority, 
a possible clashing of authorities. So long as both partners are of one 
mind, or so long as one cheerfully accepts the subordinate position, all 
may go well. English institutions have existed and flourished very largely 
because rival authorities prefer compromise over points of difference to 
battles for supremacy. When differences become too acute for compromise 
and one side or the other must give way, the situation may be saved by 
the timely surrender of one or the other ; but, if it is not so saved, no 
alternative remains but a fight. And this is precisely what happened in 
the time of the Stuarts. The differences between Crown and parliament 
became too acute for compromise, neither would give way, and the stakes 
of the fight ceased to be the particular questions at issue and became the 
larger question of the permanent supremacy of the one or the other of the 
partners. Even in Elizabeth's last years there were indications of very 
acute friction, though a direct contest was averted partly by Elizabeth's 
diplomatic withdrawal and partly by the inclination of parliament to defer 
a serious struggle till after the old queen's death. The Crown and the 
people had been loyal to each other so long, and through a crisis so 
tremendous, that neither could willingly contemplate an open rupture. 



II 

THE CHURCH 

The Reformation in England was primarily the handiwork of Henry VIII. ; 
its completion was the logical outcome of Henry VIII.'s policy, though it 
was by no means what that king himself contemplated. What Henry him- 
self carried out was a revolution, not doctrinal nor moral but political. 
When he came to the throne, Western Christendom formed one single 
spiritual organisation. The Church was co-extensive not with the State 



368 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

but with Christendom ; since Eastern Christianity, the " orthodoxy " of the 
Greek, not the Roman Church, was in the Western view outside the pale, 
not pagan but heretical. Within the Western area all Christians belonged 
to that one organisation, and the only non-Christians tolerated were the 
Jews. Within the Church, so far as doctrine and practice were denned, no 
diversities were permitted ; nor did the State sanction the existence of 
Christian sects external to the Church. It followed that all individuals 
owed a double allegiance, to the Universal Church and to the particular 
State. The essential feature of Henry's Reformation was the repudiation 
by the State of the existence of any such double allegiance. The citizen 
owed allegiance to the State alone, or to the Church only subject to the 

State's sanction. It did not 
follow of necessity that the 
State would sanction one 
Church only. It might sanc- 
tion one or many or none at 
all. The authority of the 
State might be repudiated, 
but it could and would en- 
force its de facto supremacy. 
It was not a matter of 
necessity, but it was practi- 
cally a matter of course, that 
the State should sanction 
in these circumstances one 
Church coterminous with itself. In effect it treated the Church in England 
as the Church of England, the ecclesiastical expression of the State, though 
it did not quarrel with the liberty of churchmen to regard themselves still 
as members of the Universal Church, provided that they remained in 
practice obedient to the State control ; and explicitly from Henry's point of 
view the State in this connection meant the Crown. In the theory of the 
State, there was no real change ; the State merely asserted the authority 
which it had always possessed. Such changes as were made were not 
organic, but were simply administrative modifications. And this view that 
the Church retained its identity was made possible of acceptance by the 
Church itself, by the retention of the Ordination which gave continuity to 
the priesthood. Thus spiritually in the eyes of the Church, and legally in 
the eyes of the State, the continuity of the Church was preserved. 

But diversity was contemplated no more than in the past. No one was 
to be permitted to separate himself from the Church ; there were to be no 
external sects. Yet in the general intellectual ferment of Europe, immense 
uncertainties had arisen as to what doctrines and practices were positively 
enjoined, what were permitted, what were sanctioned as mere matter of 
convenience, what were immutable by the sanction of Divine law. Defini- 
tion was necessary or there would be chaos within the Church. Rome 




A cut from the Great Bible of 1539. 



UNDER THE TUDORS 369 

established her own definitions by the Council of Trent. England estab- 
lished hers by formularies prepared mainly by clerical commissions and 
sanctioned by the Crown and parliament. Of these formularies, the first 
was the Ten Articles of Henry VIII. and the last the Thirty-nine Articles 
incorporated in the Prayer Book during the reign of Elizabeth. Between 
these two stages there were violent fluctuations. But throughout the root 
principle remained the same ; the definitions laid down with the sanction 
of the State must be accepted by all ; departure from them subjected the 
recalcitrant to penalties which ranged from burning down to fines or dis- 
ability to discharge public functions. Definitions might be rigid or loose, 
penalties might be mild or severe, but within the scope of the definitions 
uniformity was to be enforced. Toleration in the sense that men were 




The two Shepherds. 
[From a drawing by Hans Sachs, about 1525.] 

at liberty to follow the dictates of their own conscience was hardly 
dreamed of. But the characteristic of the formularies of Elizabeth, to 
whom it fell to make a finally acceptable settlement, was a wide latitude 
which admitted within the pale on the one hand followers of John Knox, 
and on the other men whom many Calvinists regarded as no better 
than Papists. 

The State demand'ed from the laity only outward conformity, a decent 
observance of practices enjoined, abstention from practices forbidden. 
Privately a man might hold what opinions he liked, so long as those 
opinions did not materialise into actions or language subversive of the 
authorised institutions and doctrines. For some time even disobedience, un- 
less thrust upon the notice of the authorities, was to a great extent winked 
at. Neither Romanist nor Protestant sectarians were much interfered with, 
unless they chose to be aggressive, until first the papal bull of deposition 

2 A 



3/0 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

and then the Jesuit propaganda of Parsons and Campian brought Romanism 
under suspicion of treason, stiffened the enforcement of conformity, and 
brought all kinds of overt nonconformity under the ban. 

Now Elizabeth herself was not a woman of strong religious feeling 
like her sister Mary. Her religion was in the main dictated by politics. 
Probably if she had been circumstanced like Henry IV. of France, she, 
like him, would have considered that the Crown was " worth a Mass," 
although, not being similarly circumstanced, she expressed much righteous 
indignation when he acted upon that view. But her intellectual sympathies 
were on the side of the conservative element in the Church, the element 
which desired the least possible departure from the old practices and 
doctrines. A substantial proportion of the nobility, especially of what 
remained of the old nobility, was on the same side, and also perhaps 
of the old gentry. The north, too, was conservative, as it had been 
in her father's time, though in this respect the south-west had under- 
gone a transformation. Hence enthusiastic Romanists perpetually suffered 
from a conviction that the country would welcome the restoration of 
Romanism. 

On the other hand, however, the parliaments were very emphatically 
Protestant, more Protestant than Elizabeth's government ; and every one 
of Elizabeth's ministers, though in somewhat varying degrees, leaned in 
the same direction. It is hardly to be imagined that this would have been 
the case if popular sentiment had been with the reactionaries. At all times 
parliament was ready, even eager, to go further than the queen in favouring 
the puritan element in the Church, repressing Romanism, attacking Mary 
Stuart, and adopting an aggressively Protestant attitude towards the 
European Powers. The English people have never, like the Scots, taken 
a keen delight in metaphysical and logical arguments or troubled themselves 
greatly with dogmatic subtleties. But a great many of them connected 
Romanism with the fires of Smithfield, the brutalities of Alva in the 
Netherlands, and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, or still more 
luridly after 1572 with the Paris massacre. Romanists might indeed retort 
upon Protestants a few years later by pointing to Jesuit martyrs and 
to the sufferings of the Irish ; but the English had then already learnt 
to look upon the Jesuits as traitors and upon the Irish as wild beasts, 
so that the retort fell flat. Nowhere outside of the northern counties was 
there ever the slightest sign that the mass of the people was Romanist 
in its sympathies. 

In fact, the question of the future was not whether England would 
revert to Rome, but whether Calvinism would dominate the Church in 
England as it very emphatically did in Scotland. In both countries, the 
secular government was antagonistic to Calvinism, and to the conceptions 
of Church government and of the relations of Church and State associated 
with the Calvinistic creed. On the other hand, intense hostility to Rome 
and to the active champions of Rome tended of itself to generate 



UNDER THE TUDORS 371 

Calvinism, simply because Calvinism was the form of Protestantism which 
was most palpably irreconcilable to Romanism. 

After the Bull of Deposition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
active hostility to Rome increased and Calvinism in England became more 
aggressive. In part it merely took the shape of what was called Noncon- 
formity, the demand for the abolition of ceremonial observances which 
weie looked upon as papistical, or at least for permission to dispense with 
them. But then there arose the demand for a change in the form of 
Church government on Presbyterian lines. This called for active repres- 
sion, for the Crown held the doctrine, summarised in a favourite phrase of 
James VI., after he became King of England, "No bishop, no king." Even 
within the Church organisation, certain of the advanced clergy constructed 
a Presbyterian organisation. Presbyterianism was to the full as rigid in 
its demand for uniformity as was the State itself, and sought to impose its 
own particular views on the whole body. It had no sympathy with the 
audacious individualism of the group who at this time began to be known 
as Brownists, and subsequently became exceedingly formidable under the 
name of Independents ; a group which claimed freedom of conscience for 
each separate congregation, the right of each congregation to worship 
unmolested after its own fashion. In the sixteenth century, at least, such 
an idea appeared to be hopelessly anarchical, subversive alike of State and 
Church. 

Now Elizabeth's first Archbishop of Canterbury was the typical 
moderate Matthew Parker ; and Parker was succeeded by Grindal, whose 
sympathies were entirely with that party which in modern phraseology 
would be termed Evangelical. Thus at the time when he was succeeded in 
1583 by Archbishop Whitgift, the Evangelicals were exceedingly active in 
the Church, while the tide of severe repression against the Romanists had 
just set in, in consequence of the great Jesuit mission. It appeared that 
credit for impartial justice would be the more readily obtained if Protestant 
indiscipline were sternly dealt with at the same time with Romanism. 
Whitgift was not so much a High Churchman as a rigorous disciplinarian, 
and his primacy was signalised by the establishment of the Court of High 
Commission for dealing with ecclesiastical causes, which had been 
sanctioned by the Act of Uniformity a score of years earlier, though it had 
never been actually constituted. The Court's methods were inquisitorial 
and arbitrary, and were clearly disapproved by Lord Burleigh. It enforced 
uniformity very much more rigidly than had been done in the past, with the 
effect of intensifying the hostility of the advanced school to the episcopal 
system as an instrument of tyranny. Thence there issued a violent and 
unseemly onslaught on that system by the publication of a series of tracts 
signed Martin Mar-Prelate, in the year following the Armada. 

The violence of the pamphleteers created a certain reaction, and this, 
coupled with the actual and fancied existence of all manner of Romanist 
plots, led in turn to increasingly severe legislation in 1593, directed against 



372 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

the Romanists on one side and the Nonconformists on the other. It 
should, however, be remarked in passing, that the Nonconformists did not 
seek to separate themselves from the Church, but remained professedly 
within it, while protesting against certain doctrines and practices ; even as 
Cranmer had remained Archbishop of Canterbury while avowing to the 
king, at serious risk to himself, his personal adherence to views condemned 
by the Six Articles. These measures now resulted in the expulsion or emigra- 
tion, chiefly to Holland, of the determined Brownists. The bulk of the 
Nonconformists, however, preferred obedience under protest to exile, and the 
Church parties became more and more differentiated as High Churchmen 
and Puritans, the names which afterwards came to be generally adopted to 
distinguish them. At the same time what may be called Liberal church- 
manship was finding admirable expression in what is perhaps the first 
monumental work of English prose, the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard 
Hooker, which exemplifies the attitude of all the greater minds of the day 
in England. 



Ill 
ECONOMIC PROGRESS 

TheTudors inaugurated the great period of English commercial expansion. 
Henry VII. made the development of the national wealth an explicit object 
of policy, the State operating by means of commercial treaties, although he 
did not hesitate to employ commercial wars as a means to securing quite 
other political ends. The root principle of the politico-economic theory 
known as Mercantilism was already being formulated, namely, that wealth 
is to be sought as a means to national power. It was not assumed 
that wealth is convertible into power as a matter of course ; on the 
contrary, it was frequently assumed that wealth might be accumulated at 
the expense of power ; it did not follow that the course which was 
economically the best was politically the best. 

On this theory, then, trades and employments should be encouraged 
which tended to develop national strength ; trade which enriched another 
nation was to be discouraged ; the prosperity of a neighbour probably, of a 
rival certainly, was looked upon as injurious. The importance to the State 
of possessing a large amount of gold and silver gave rise to the doctrine 
that a trade which exchanged treasure for goods was bad for the country, 
but that one which exchanged goods for treasure was beneficial. It 
became, therefore, the duty of the State to control commerce, to encourage 
or discourage it actively, with a view to maintaining the " balance of trade " 
■ — that is, of securing an inflow of treasure greater than the outflow — the 
artificial development of industries regarded as beneficial, as, for instance, 
the manufacture of gunpowder and ordnance, and in particular the in- 



UNDER THE TUDORS 373 

crease of shipping, which the England of the sixteenth century was learning 
to look upon as of quite vital importance. 

The principal means to the encouragement of shipping was found in 
the Navigation Acts, favouring goods exported or imported in English 
bottoms ; and to these must be added the post-Reformation ordinances in- 
sisting on the Lenten fast — issued by Protestant governments even while they 
repudiated fasting on religious grounds as a papistical superstition — because 
employment was 
given thereby to the 
deep-sea fishermen 
and sailors, and so 
shipbuilding and the 
mariner's art were 
fostered. But the 
State left it to private 
enterprise to turn 
maritime energy to 
commercial account. 
After the first start, 
sailors and explorers 
owed nothing to the 
State, although Eliza- 
bethpersonally specu- 
lated in some of their 
ventures on terms ex- 
ceedingly profitable to 
herself. 

Perhaps, how- 
ever, we should qualify 
the statement that 
private enterprise 




was unaided, 
government 
tinued on an 
monopolies in 



The 
con- 
extended 
order to 



At the market, 1603. 
[From a broadside.] 



scale to employ the old method of granting 
extend trade. Of these monopolies there were 
two types, those which were granted to mercantile companies, and 
those which were granted to individuals. In the past the great examples 
of monopolist Companies had been the Merchants of the Staple and the 
Merchant Adventurers, who had exclusive rights of trading in certain 
classes of goods in Western Europe. Such monopolies were in fact 
a condition of the progress of trade, or at least appeared to be so. 
Other states practically excluded the foreign private trader, as did the 
English themselves. The trader was admitted only if he was an enrolled 
member of a Company which was responsible for his good behaviour and 
could be penalised if its members set rules and regulations at nought. To 



374 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

a Company which was under control privileges might be conceded. A 
Company to which authority had been granted could control its members, 
but unless the grant conveyed also a monopoly, it would have no control 
over traders who were not members. It could not protect itself against 
the misconduct of such persons, while they, on the other hand, would have 
the utmost difficulty, acting as private individuals, in enforcing for them- 
selves such rights as the law might concede to them. Provided that the 
monopolist Company was open to all would-be traders on reasonable terms, 
it was ordinarily to the advantage of the private individual to trade under 
its aegis ; while the Company itself was liable to suffer damage from illegiti- 
mate practices, if non-members were per- 
mitted to trade within its area. Commercial 
treaties were effective under the Company 
system, but would have been a dead letter 
without it. 

That was a state of things which passed 
away in Western Europe as the ordinary 
machinery of the law became sufficient to 
protect the community against the un- 
principled " free trader," the trader who 
was not a member of a Company, and to 
secure the individual in his rights even when 
there was no organised Company at his 
back to help him. But the maritime ex- 
pansion of the sixteenth century opened up 
new markets or new fields of enterprise, where 
the economic arguments which had warranted 
the old monopolies were more effective than ever. The great bar to enter- 
prise was insecurity, and a chartered Company could give a comparative 
security to its members. But the chances of profit were too precarious, 
unless the Company itself could protect itself from the reckless competition 
of the free-trading adventurer ; in other words, unless it had a legal mono* 
poly. So in Elizabeth's reign there began a multiplication of chartered 
Companies for trading in the more remote and less civilised portions of the 
globe. Thus the Eastern or Prussian Company was established for trading 
with the Baltic, the Muscovy Company for the Russian trade, the Levant 
Company, and, finally, on the last day of the year 1600, the East India 
Company. 

Analogous to these were the patents granted for colonisation to Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh in America. These were the 
men who first conceived the mighty vision of a new England beyond the 
ocean, where Englishmen should find a new home. The Spaniard had 
secured the treasure-regions of the south, and Englishmen were eager 
enough to break through the Spanish monopoly, to join on their own 
account in the hunt for Eldorado j but Gilbert and Raleigh dreamed of 




Weaving in the 16th century. 
[From Erasmus, " In Praise of Folly."] 



UNDER THE TUDORS 375 

something far different, something which was realised in those colonies 
which have developed into the United States of America. To neither of 
them was it given to realise the dream. Gilbert tried vainly to plant a 
colony in the vague northern region known as Norumbega, but his ship 
foundered at sea when he was returning to England. After him. his half- 
brother Raleigh spent wealth and brains and energy in the attempt to plant 
his colony of Virginia, whither he sent expeditions year after year, only to 
find each time that the last group of settlers had been wiped out. Only 
in the next reign, when Raleigh was eating his heart out in the Tower, was 
the colony of Virginia really created ; the child of a commercial chartered 
Company. 

Somewhat different was the basis on which trading monopolies were 
granted to private individuals. In theory, at least, the monopoly was 
granted in such cases with the direct object of creating industries which 
could only be nursed into life, industries in which the financial risks were 
too serious unless they were protected from competition, or which required 
the granting of special powers such as those which, in the nineteenth 
century, it was necessary to confer upon railway companies. In practice, 
the system became liable to serious abuse, and occasionally, at least, the 
Crown conferred monopolies for the enrichment of private individuals 
where there was no adequate excuse for prohibiting competition. At the 
end of Elizabeth's reign the grievance had become sufficiently serious 
to threaten a rupture between the Crown and parliament ; a rupture 
which was averted by the tactful skill with which Elizabeth promised to 
withdraw and- prohibit obnoxious monopolies, although the promise was 
not in fact observed. 

The State sought to encourage new industries, as it sought to encourage 
commercial enterprise, by granting monopolies to the pioneers, but also 
by the introduction of foreign craftsmen. In particular, privileges were 
granted to refugees from Alva's persecution in the Low Countries, where 
textile arts in especial were practised which had not yet been taken up in 
England, in spite of the great development of the cloth manufacture. It is 
probable that refugees from Antwerp introduced the cotton industry, although 
its great development was deferred for a couple of centuries. 

We have already described the depression of the rural population, 
which reached its climax in the middle years of the century. The process 
of enclosure appears'to have come to an end quite early in Elizabeth's reign 
with the disappearance of the immense disparity between the profits of 
wool-growing and of tillage. The constant displacement of labour ceased, 
and the problem was reduced to that of finding employment for those already 
displaced, of whom a large proportion were willing enough to work if they 
could get work to do upon reasonable terms. The system of apprenticeship 
controlled by the gilds had in the past shut this displaced labour out of 
employment in the trading and manufacturing industries ; but the expansion 
of trade, and the multiplication of minor industries which were not subject 



376 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

to gild regulations, now began to provide employment for this surplus 
working population. 

The Statute of Apprentices, an Act passed quite early in the reign of 
Elizabeth, did much towards the settling of industrial conditions. In spite 
of the fact that there was manifestly a good deal of wealth in the country, 
though Henry VIII.'s depredations and the financial chaos of the two next 
reigns were extremely unsettling, the chartered towns throughout the Tudor 
period, until the accession of Elizabeth, were losing their old prosperity, 
which was already to some extent falling off in the fifteenth century. They 
were responsible for their own misfortunes, which were largely the outcome 

of the self-protective 
policy of the gilds, 
which tried to make 
a close preserve of 
their trades. They 
forbade the practice 
of a trade by any one 
who had not qualified 
by a stated term of 
apprenticeship, the 
numbers of appren- 
tices were limited, 
and apprenticeship 
itself was open only 
to the children of 
the comparatively prosperous. Theoretically, these rules were enforced 
in order to maintain a high standard of efficiency, though it is safe to 
suppose that the desire to restrict competition was really a more active 
motive with the gild councils. But the actual effect was to drive 
would-be competitors out of the chartered towns into the unchartered 
market-towns, where there was no authority to enforce gild regulations. 
The high standards were, perhaps, not maintained, but production was 
cheaper, and the market towns attracted the custom which before had been 
concentrated in the chartered towns. By the Statute of Apprentices 
uniformity was introduced. It ceased to be the business of the local 
authority to make the regulations, which were laid down by law ; the local 
authority becoming the machinery through which the law was enforced. 
Seven years' apprenticeship was required before any one could set up in 
trade on his own account in the then recognised trades, and the whole 
country was covered by the regulations, instead of only the chartered 
towns, while the conditions of admission to apprenticeship were made less 
rigorous in the latter. In what were regarded as superior trades, a property 
qualification for the parents of apprentices was preserved, so that their 
social status was maintained. These trades presented no opening for the 
unemployed rural population, but in minor trades the property qualification 




Eastcheap market about 1598. 
[From a drawing in the British Museum.] 



UNDER THE TUDORS 377 

was reduced or abolished. Moreover, the statute only applied to the 
existing trades which were scheduled in the Act, so that the new trades 
which sprang up during the reign were outside its operation. From this 
period dates the development of spinning and weaving in particular, as 
occupations engaging the rural population, in addition to agricultural labour. 
No apprenticeship was required, and the industry could be made supple- 
mentary to field work, besides giving employment to women and children. 

The enclosures had been responsible for bringing into prominence a 
problem which had not been aggres- 



- — wnp 




sively noticeable in the Middle 
Ages ; the double problem, it may 
be called, of helpless poverty and 
wilful vagrancy. Both were further 
intensified by the dissolution of 
the monasteries, which, on the one 
hand, was followed by an increase 
of enclosure, while, on the other 
hand, it abolished the one institu- 
tion which admitted a sort of pro- 
fessional responsibility for the care 
of the indigent. Whatever the sins 
of the monks may have been, the 
monasteries, in fact, did a good 
deal towards clothing the naked and 
feeding the hungry, though their 
methods probably encouraged those 
who preferred idle beggary to labori- 
ous poverty. But when the mon- 
asteries were dissolved, no one 
admitted responsibility for main- 
taining the indigent, and the number of sturdy vagabonds was multiplied. 

Then some town corporations experimented on their own account, and 
Elizabeth's exceedingly practical ministers extended the experiments. The 
object was to differentiate between the wilfully idle and the poor who were 
either incapable of work or were idle only because they could find no work 
to do. The failure of appeals for voluntary contributions led to the 
levying of compulsory' contributions for the maintenance of the impotent 
poor, and the results of forty years of experimentation were formulated 
in the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which continued in force with little 
modification for nearly two centuries. The law established a poor-rate in 
every parish, and workhouses ; where relief was given to those who were 
unable to work, and work was given to those who applied for relief because 
they were unable to find employment, while those who declined to work 
and preferred to beg were severely penalised. As a general rule, there was 
now a sufficiency of employment for those who were willing to work ; 



16th century mendicants. 
[From Barclay's " Ship of Fools."] 



378 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

the parish provided relief for those who were actually incapable ; the wilful 
vagrant was marked off from the man who was willing to work ; and 
throughout a very long period the problems of pauperism and unem- 
ployment again dropped into the background. 



IV 
LITERATURE 

Until the age of Chaucer, at the close of the fourteenth century, England 
had produced nothing which could enable her to rank among the literary 
peoples. Before the accession of Henry VII. Wiclif's Bible, Langland's 
Piers Plowman, the works of Chaucer himself, and the Morte d' Arthur of 
Mallory, were the only works in the English tongue which could in any 
sense be held to rank as classics. In the reigns of Edward IV. and of 
Henry VII. the intellectual movement was at last beginning to take hold 
of the English. Education and liberal studies received a strong stimulus, 
but still an English literature was unborn. Sir Thomas More's native 
humour combined with his Platonism to produce the Utopia before Martin 
Luther had flung down his challenge to the papacy ; but the Utopia was 
written in Latin, not in English. Literary energy was almost entirely 
absorbed in pamphleteering and theological controversy, and of poetry there 
was none in England until the latter years of Henry VIII. ; unless we 
dignify by the name of poetry the satires of John Skelton, whose doggerel 
rhymes have at least immortalised his name. Scotland, on the other hand, 
produced William Dunbar, who may in some sort be regarded as the 
remote progenitor of Robert Burns ; and in Bishop Gavin Douglas and 
Sir David Lindsay, the northern poets maintained their claim to have 
carried on the Chaucerian tradition much more successfully than their 
southern neighbours. The capacities of English prose found their best 
expression in the great translations of the Bible by William Tyndale and 
others, of which our own " authorised version " is a modification, in the 
music of the new English Church Services, and in the racy rhetoric of 
Hugh Latimer's Sermons. Still, before Henry VIII. was dead, Surrey 
and Wyatt, harbingers of the coming dawn, were weaving dainty fancies 
into dainty verse, learnt mainly from Italian models, piping a delicate 
prelude to the glorious outburst of Elizabethan song. 

Yet fully twenty years of Elizabeth's own reign were past before any 
sign appeared that the poets were to share with the sailors the glories of 
her reign. Only in translation had it been shown that English prose could 
be made an instrument of artistic expression, though Foxe in the work 
commonly called the Book of Martyrs, and John Knox in his History of the 
Reformation in Scotland, had proved its capacity for vigorous narrative. The 



UNDER THE TUDORS 379 

year which signalises the birth of a new era is 1579, the year in which 
appeared the Shepherd's Calendar of Edmund Spenser, and that very amazing 
work the Enphues of John Lyly. 

The one great original work of the early Tudor period was More's 
Utopia. Himself no mean scholar, and the intimate friend of all the best 
scholars of his time, the son of a judge, and bred up in part in the house- 
hold of Cardinal Morton, More as a young man was strongly drawn towards 
entering the religious life. But something withheld him. He became an 
active man of affairs, and a somewhat unwilling favourite of Henry VIII. 
He was Speaker in C L ' 

the House of Com- tebrUUnt^. 

mons which declined 
to be brow-beaten by 
Cardinal Wolsey, 
whom he succeeded 
as Chancellor. He 
resigned the Chan- 
cellorship on a point 
of conscience, be- 
cause he would not 
admit that a secular 
authority could be 
supreme in matters 
spiritual ; and he 
cheerfully chose to 
be beheaded as a traitor when he was offered his choice between acknow- 
ledging the royal supremacy over the Church and losing his head. Such 
was the man who, in his imaginary Commonwealth, depicted by contrast 
the social and political conditions of his time as he saw them, with a 
satire none the less penetrating for its kindliness. His ideal Common- 
wealth is an anticipation of modern socialistic dreams ; dreams, that is, of a 
Christian socialism, resting not upon economic but upon moral foundations, 
and reaching back to the communistic doctrines of Plato's Republic. 

Euphuism has been held up to our ridicule, but Euphues is very far 
from being altogether ridiculous. It is full of an extravagant pedantry, an 
exaggerated foppery of phraseology, a fantastic playing upon words, which 
at first invite burlesque emulation but very soon become inexpressibly 
tedious. But Euphues meant something serious. Admirable moral aims, 
indeed, are not a passport to Helicon ; the significance of the work lies in 
the fact that it was a deliberate attempt to create a style, a conscious effort 
to give prose composition a decorative value, to apply to prose the idea of 
artistic selection in the use of words. The actual result was fantastic 
enough, and fantastical conversation modelled upon it became the fashion 
in polite society ; the wits played with Euphuism, and if Shakespeare 
burlesqued it, its influence is also nevertheless apparent in many passages 




A cut from the rare first edition of Spenser's " Shepherd's Calendar." 



380 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

which have no savour of parody. English style we may say for the first 
time became self-conscious in John Lyly's work, which is thereby rendered 
significant ; it became absurd chiefly because it had not learnt to conceal 
its self-consciousness and to produce the impression of spontaneity. 

At the same time Spenser, in the Shepherd's Calendar, achieved, in what 
we call minor poetry, a standard which decisively proved the effectiveness 
of the English tongue in that field. It was not till ten years later, when 
the Armada had come and gone, that the first book of the Faerie Quecne 
definitely enriched the literature of the world. Had the age of Elizabeth 
produced no other poet than Spenser it would still have been glorious in 
the annals of poetry. 

But it was in another field that the mightiest triumph was to come. 
The poetic glory of ancient Athens had lain in her drama, and the drama 
had retained its place in the front rank as a form of literary expression 
until Christianity dominated the Roman Empire. The Church prohibited 
it, but could not prohibit the instinct for dramatic representation. There- 
fore it turned that instinct to its own uses, sanctioning only the Miracle 
plays, Mysteries, and Moralities, which were intended allegorically to 
impress on the vulgar mind the superiority of virtue over vice. But in 
this medieval substituted for drama, the essential matter was the pantomime, 
the dialogue was merely an accompaniment. In the early sixteenth century, 
when the ecclesiastical conventions were losing their authority, the Moralities 
were supplemented on the one hand by masques and pageants, which 
gratified the popular taste for gorgeous display, and on the other hand by 
a development of buffoonery, which the Church, in its consideration for 
the weakness of the flesh, had allowed as an accompaniment of its Sermons 
in Pantomime. 

But at the same time, the revived study of the ancient literatures and 
of the new literature to which it had given birth in Italy began to awaken 
an imitative tendency. The first English play was a comedy constructed 
by the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall for his boys to perform, adapted from 
a classic model, in the reign of Queen Mary ; the first blank-verse tragedy, 
Gorbodnc, was acted some three years after Elizabeth's accession. Com- 
panies of strolling players began to perambulate the country, though of the 
nature and quality of the plays they performed we have practically no 
knowledge. The performances generally took place in a nobleman's hall 
or the yard of an inn, and some twenty years after Elizabeth's accession 
they had already become so popular as to seduce the errant youth of the 
metropolis from the due observance of their religious duties. The per- 
formers were expelled from the city, and, perhaps for this reason, began to 
localise themselves in permanent centres, and to construct playhouses. 
Peele, Greene, and others, for the most part undisciplined young men who 
had enjoyed a university education, began to write for the players dramas 
of a higher literary standard; and in 1587 young Christopher Marlowe's 
terrific melodrama, Tamburlaine, was presented on the boards. 



UNDER THE TUDORS 381 

Tambtirlaine does not itself rank as a great tragedy. Marlowe was but 
three-and-twenty, the same age as William Shakespeare. The only known 
canons of the tragic art were those laid down nearly two thousand years 
before by Aristotle. The English tragedians had still to arrive at canons of 
their cwn. But Tamburlaine was the work of one who, though he died 
before he was thirty, killed it is said in a tavern brawl, lived long enough 
to prove that his tragic genius was unsurpassed, though not long enough to 
consummate his artistic method. In the year of Marlowe's death Shake- 
speare himself was certainly 
writing for the stage, and 
from that date, 1593, on- 
wards, .through the last ten 
years of Elizabeth's reign 
and through many years of 
that of her successor, there 
was no year which did not 
witness the production of a 
masterpiece, either of comedy 
or of tragedy. 

We speak of the Eliza- 
bethan literature ; but we do 
not generally realise that not 
one line of the great litera- 
ture associated with her reign 
was published until after the 
Armada. Until then Spenser 
and Marlowe had done only 
apprentice work. It would 
seem as if, down to that 
tremendous crisis, men's 
hearts and brains were ab- 
sorbed in action. The fame 




Shakespeare. 
[The Droeshout portrait.] 



of nearly all the great men of action of the reign had reached or was 
reaching its zenith in 1588 ; but if none of the English poets whom wc 
call Elizabethans had survived that year, Spenser alone would be re- 
membered to-day, and he only as an attractive minor poet. Even so in 
Athens of old, after the tremendous crisis of the Persian War, the triumphs 
of Marathon and Salamis were matched by the triumphs of ^Eschylus and 
Sophocles ; they were the triumphs of the generation which was only 
maturing at the moment of the great crisis of national liberty. Of the 
great group of dramatists among whom Shakespeare stands supreme, some 
were altogether unknown until after Elizabeth's death ; excepting Marlowe, 
none was heard of before 1593, and all lived far into the reign of James. 
Yet they are rightly termed Elizabethans, since they were all the offspring 
of the great outburst of national vitality in Elizabeth's reign. 



382 THE AGE OF TRANSITION 

Amongst Elizabethans must also be ranked Richard Hooker, whose 
Ecclesiastical Polity was mentioned in connection with the religious move- 
ments. An Elizabethan too was Francis Bacon, in genius second only 
to Shakespeare, to whom he was slightly senior. But the product of 
Bacon's powers belongs almost entirely to the following reign ; before then 
he had only given the world a taste of his quality by the publication 
of his essays ; and although he himself was a product of the Elizabethan 
spirit, he was in many respects rather the forerunner of the scientific 
age which was dawning than the glory of the poetic age in which he 
was bred. 



BOOK IV 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

CHAPTER XV 

RIGHT DIVINE 

I 

THE SPRING OF TROUBLES 

The accession of James VI. of Scotland to the throne of England as the 
legitimate heir of Henry VII. and his wife united at last the Crowns of the 
two kingdoms, which for centuries had looked upon each other as foes 
even when their relations were formally friendly. Technically under the 
will of Henrys VIII., which had never been formally set aside, Lord 
Beauchamp, the son of Catherine Grey and of the Earl of Hertford, was 
the heir, because Henry had postponed claims through his elder sister 
Margaret to claims through his younger sister Mary. James I., like 
Henry VIII. and Edward VI., could definitely claim to represent by seniority 
of descent the house of Plantagenet. That was a claim which neither 
Henry VII. not Richard III., nor any member of the house of Lancaster 
had been able or assert. Nor could the title be challenged on the 
ground that descent through females was invalid, because there was no 
one living who could profess descent in unbroken male line from the 
royal house. 

The English people could no doubt assert that they had never re- 
cognised an indefeasible title to the throne on the part of a monarch, and 
had always claimed the right to divert the line of succession ; but it re- 
mained open to James to assert that all such diversions had been de jure 
invalid. He had become king de facto by consent of the nation ; no one 
else could claim to be king de jure on any principles whatever ; but he 
could also claim to be king de jure, irrespective of national consent, by the 
immutable law of succession by Divine right, as the lineal descendant of 
William the Conqueror and the lineal representative of the house of Cerdic. 
Hitherto the royal authority had been content to rest itself upon human 
law and precedent ; it remained for the Stuarts to find for it a sanction in 

383 



384 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

a Divine law higher than human law and precedent, the recognition of 
which would set the king himself above all human law and precedent. The 
assumption was harmless, so long as the king in practice consented to be 
bound by law and precedent ; the trouble arose when kings refused to be 
so bound. The theory of Divine Right was for the first time asserted by 
James, but he did not carry his insistence upon it to the extreme point in 
practice. Hence the great collision between Crown and parliament was 

deferred to the reign of his successor. Never- 
theless, it was James who set the ball rolling. 
The claim that the Crown was bound by pre- 
cedent not of right, but only of grace, entailed 
not only the stubborn assertion by parlia- 
ment of the contrary principle but also its 
interpretation of precedents in a sense which 
would have been emphatically repudiated 
by the Tudors ; with the result that royal 
prerogatives hitherto unquestioned were chal- 
lenged and abolished, and finally the succes- 
sion was diverted into a new line which could 
not pretend to rule by any higher title than 
the national consent. 

The British people is not given to con- 
cerning itself greatly with abstract theories 
until they are applied to practical questions 
in a tangible manner. On the basis of the 
new theory the Crown sought to assert rights 
of arbitrary taxation, arbitrary control of re- 
ligion, and arbitrary imposition of penalties. 
By exceeding its prerogative, or powers estab- 
lished by precedent, it caused those preroga- 
tives to be challenged. Hence it became 
clear that they must either be extended so as 
to make the Crown decisively predominant over parliament, or curtailed^ 
so as to make parliament decisively predominant over the Crown. The 
battle cost Charles I. his head ; but the republic which replaced the 
monarchy took the form of a Military Dictatorship as arbitrary as any 
monarchy. The monarchy was restored with the royal prerogatives curtailed ; 
but the renewed attempt to establish absolutism brought about the expulsion 
of the Stuarts and the retention of a monarchy under conditions which 
precluded the possibility of a revival of the claims of the Crown. 

The history of the Stuarts down to what the Whigs called the " Glorious 
Revolution" of 1688 is not concerned exclusively with this great constitu- 
tional struggle ; but that struggle entirely occupies the foreground. The 
first great phase of it extends over the whole period from 1603 to 1640, 
and accordingly it will be here treated continuously in a single chapter 




A musketeer of 1603. 
[From Skelton's "Armour."] 



RIGHT DIVINE 385 

instead of being arbitrarily divided at the moment of the accession of 
Charles I. As a preliminary we shall review the conditions out of which 
the contest arose, and by which it was affected. 

We shall find that the antagonism between Crown and parliament arose 
primarily out of two questions, taxation and religion. The religious 
question was the outcome of the growth of what is called Puritanism in 
England, and the question of taxation was made acute by the foreign policy 
of the Crown. We shall therefore in the first place outline the European 
conditions which indirectly helped to force on the constitutional struggle. 

When Elizabeth died the ruler of Spain was Philip IIL, the son of 
Elizabeth's great antagonist. In France Henry IV. had established a 
substantial degree of religious toleration by the Edict of Nantes, which con- 
ceded freedom. of worship to the Huguenots, although the Government was 
officially Catholic. In Germany for half a century the principle had been 
broadly recognised that in each principality the prince recognised that form 
of religion which was acceptable to himself. None of the emperors had 
professed Protestantism, but they had not pressed forward the papal cause 
against the reformed religion. On the other hand, the reformed states were 
divided between Calvinists and Lutherans, who were hardly less hostile to 
each other than to the papacy. In the Netherlands the contest with 
Spain had reached the stage at which it was all but certain that the 
Northern Protestant United Provinces would secure their independence, 
while the Southern Catholic Provinces would remain attached to the 
Spanish dominion. Spain was still looked upon as the aggressive champion 
of Catholicism, and neither she nor the world had yet realised her funda- 
mental weakness or awakened to the fact that the Austrian, not the Spanish, 
Hapsburgs constituted the real menace to Protestantism. The keen political 
instinct of Henry IV. did indeed recognise the growing danger to Europe 
of a coalition between the two branches of the house of Hap^burg ; but 
his schemes for an opposition League were destroyed by his assassination 
in 1 6 10, the year following the formal suspension of hostilities between 
Spain and Holland. The recognition of Ferdinand of Styria as heir to the 
Emperor marked the approach of an aggressive Catholic policy. The 
kingdom of Bohemia, which for some time past had been attached to the 
house of Austria, claimed that its monarchy was elective and chose for its 
king the Protestant Elector Palatine Frederick, instead of Ferdinand. 
Ferdinand asserted his own claim, and so in 161 8 began the Thirty Years' 
War, a struggle mainly between the Protestant and Catholic states of the 
Empire, in which the Scandinavian Powers also became involved, Spain, 
too, intervening on behalf of the Hapsburgs. In France the accession of 
a child, Louis XII I., had put the government into the hands of a regency, 
and that country became entirely absorbed in party factions and intrigues 
among the nobles, until the young king assumed the reins of government, 
and called to his aid the great minister Cardinal Richelieu, whose ascendency 
dates from 162 1. It became Richelieu's business to carry on the suspended 

2 B 



386 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

work of Henry IV. by establishing the supremacy of the Crown over the 
nobles in France, and directing an anti-Hapsburg foreign policy. As matters 
stood, the most troublesome of the nobles were also Huguenots ; and thus 
the civil broils in France assumed superficially the appearance of a religious 
struggle, although in essence it was political. The relations of England 
with Spain, France, and the Palatinate, between 1618 and 1630, were the 
main cause of the financial difficulties which, along with the religious diffi- 
culty, brought Crown and parliament in England into direct hostility. 
After that date the domestic discords practically prevented England from 
taking any part in Continental affairs until after the Commonwealth was 
established. 



II 

PURITANS, ROMANISTS, AND THE IMPOSITIONS 

The accession in England of the King of Scotland was marked by the 
discovery of two conspiracies known respectively as the Main and Bye 
plots. The object of the Bye plot was to capture the person of the new 
king and compel him to make concessions to the Romanists. The object 
of the Main plot was apparently to substitute Arabella Stuart for her 
cousin. Neither could ever have had the remotest chance of success, and 
the real interest of the Main plot lies in the fact that Cecil succeeded in 
procuring Walter Raleigh's condemnation as a participator in it. That 
crafty politician had not openly been on hostile terms with Raleigh, but 
feared his rivalry, and therefore compassed his removal from the political 
world. Raleigh was reprieved at the last moment, and was shut up for a 
dozen years in the Tower ; where he passed his time writing a History of 
the World, making chemical experiments, and dreaming of Eldorado. Cecil 
was comfortably secured as the king's right-hand man. 

James was the more readily accepted in England, because each of the 
religious sections hoped for alliance with him. As King of Scotland he 
had indubitably intrigued with the Catholics abroad, and the Romanists 
hoped that when he was secure upon the throne the penal laws would at 
least be relaxed, even if the king remained professedly a Protestant. On 
the other hand, James had been brought up by teachers of the school of 
John Knox ; and English Nonconformists dreamed that he would 
sympathise with their grievances. They had not realised his conviction 
that tl Presbyter ianism consorteth with monarchy as well as God with the 
Devil." 

Both Nonconformists and Romanists were promptly disillusioned. 
During his progress from the North James was presented with what was 
called the Millenary Petition, signed by a thousand of the clergy, praying 
for a relaxation of the ecclesiastical rules as to vestments and ceremonies, 



RIGHT DIVINE 387 

in favour of the Nonconformist views. The petition was answered by the 
calling of the Hampton Court Conference. In effect the king presided 
over an assembly of bishops to whom four of the Nonconformist clergy 
were permitted to present their case. In all but minor points the 
Conference, and the king personally, flatly rejected the Nonconformist 
petition. New canons were promulgated which enforced the regulations 
upon the clergy more 
strictly than before, and 
some hundreds were 
driven to resign their 
livings; although the 
great majority were 
able to reconcile their 
consciences to the 
practices enjoined, such 
as the use of the Sign 
of the Cross in Baptism 
and of the ring in the 
Marriage Service. The 
vehemence of the lan- 
guage of the king, who 
had not forgotten how 
Andrew Melville had 
addressed him 4 as "God's 
silly vassal," was a 
warning to the Puritans 
that they had nothing to 
hope for from the new 
regime even more em- 
phatic than the formal 
results of the Confer- 
ence. Nevertheless, 
when Parliament met, 




James I. 
[From a contemporary engraving.] 



it was obvious that the 

sympathies of the representative chamber were with the Puritans. 

On the other hand, James had many reasons for wishing to conciliate 
the Romanists. He was not only sensibly anxious to terminate the per- 
petually hostile relations with Spain, but was possessed with a fear of that 
Power very much greater than the circumstances at all warranted. More- 
over, the penal legislation of Elizabeth's later years was of an extremely 
oppressive character, excusable only on the plea that Romanism was an 
insidious political danger. Unfortunately, colour was perpetually given 
to the popular suspicion of the Romanists by reports of plots, sometimes 
fictitious but sometimes real, for which not the body of Roman Catholics 
but a few zealots were responsible. The Main and Bye plots upset the 



388 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

king's pacific intentions ; and before he had been a j^ear on the throne 
all Romanist priests were banished from the kingdom. The relaxation 
of the fines imposed on the laity for absenting themselves from the English 
church service led to a great increase in this practice, which was known 
as Recusancy ; whereby so much uneasiness was caused that after another 
twelve months the laws were again enforced with their old rigour. Again 
the zealots plunged into a crazy scheme for blowing up the king and the 
Houses of Parliament and raising the country. At the moment when the 
execution of the plot was at hand, one of the conspirators gave a hint to a 
kinsman of his who was a peer ; and he also conveyed to his fellow-con- 
spirators a warning to escape while there was yet time. The hint was 



Christopher 
RoUrB Wright 

Winter 



Iohn 

WrijM, ^^ 




The Gunpowder Plot : the Conspirators. 
[From a contemporary print now in the National Portrait Gallery,] 



taken, but the warning was not acted upon. The authorities caught Guy 
Fawkes in the cellars under the Houses of Parliament surrounded by 
barrels of gunpowder. The rest of the plotters were also captured and 
killed. Nothing could have happened more fatal to the cause of the 
Romanists. Popular terror and hatred were roused to the utmost pitch by 
the unparalleled nature of the crime which had been contemplated ; and 
for a century to come, even for two centuries, a rumour of a " popish plot " 
was all that was required to create a popular frenzy. And every government 
which displayed a disposition to relax the attitude of suspicious severity 
towards Romanist practices itself became the object of acute popular 
suspicion if not of angry hostility. 

King Henry of France is credited with having summarised the character 
of King James of England by describing him as " the wisest fool in 
Christendom." He was well versed in political theory, and was particularly 



RIGHT DIVINE 389 

well informed as to European affairs, besides being endowed with a very 
subtle intellect. Unfortunately, he was in love with his own subtlety, and 
his passion for craftiness habitually prevented him from thinking or acting 
straightforwardly ; while he was wholly deficient in that supreme quality 
of the Tudors, the capacity for gauging other men's brains and characters, 
and for reading the temper of the people over whom he ruled. The 
aims that James set before himself were often wise, but in his methods he 
neglected to take count of popular feeling. With an unbounded belief in 
his own intellectual capacity, he was extremely opinionated and at the 
same time very easily led ; while those by whom he was led were, at least 
after Robert Cecil's death, the very worst type of advisers — not statesmen 
but personal favourites. Hence everything he attempted to do was spoilt 
in the execution. 

If Romanists and Puritans were both grievously disappointed in King 
James, he himself had just reason for disappointment in the reception of his 
own ideas for the union of his two kingdoms. In both England and 
Scotland there had in the past been statesmen who realised that the incor- 
poration of the two in a single State would be an achievement from 
which both would benefit. The Union of the Crowns was merely a step 
to that achievement, making it impossible for the two nations to pursue 
hostile foreign policies. The foreign policy of the State could only be the 
foreign policy of its king. Scotland and England could not fight each 
other, except on the hypothesis that one or other was in a state of rebellion 
against the king. This in itself was a great gain, but was very far from 
uniting the two States into one political community with common interests. 
That was the consummation desired by the king, but the nations were not 
yet ready for it. The Scots were afraid of being subordinated to the 
English, and the English were in no hurry to admit the Scots to full 
English citizenship. - The countries remained separate and under separate 
governments. Scotsmen indeed planted themselves in England and pros- 
pered greatly, to the disgust of Englishmen ; but practically the only step 
towards a closer union was the dictum of the judges, that persons born after 
the Union were naturalised subjects on the soil of that country in which 
they had not been born ; that a Scot who transferred himself to England 
had all the rights of an English citizen, and an Englishman transferring 
himself to Scotland had the same rights as if he had been born a Scot. In 
practice Englishmen did not migrate to Scotland, whereas Scots did migrate 
to England in considerable numbers, but the Union hardly tended to in- 
crease mutual goodwill. The visitors from the North came to exploit 
England for their own benefit, and their success in so doing was not popular. 

In Ireland it may be claimed that matters went better than under the 
Tudors. Although Tyrone had come to terms with the English government, 
his character and ambitions made it impossible to depend on his loyalty. 
With a man of his type there were two alternatives ; either he must be 
treated as Henry VII. had treated the old Earl of Kildare, and be practically 



390 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

constituted viceroy of Ireland, or he must be completely suppressed. The 
Government was saved from the dilemma by the great Earl's flight from 
the country, which left no chief powerful enough to threaten rebellion, 
especially as Tyrconnell also fled. Both were held guilty of treason, and 
there were extensive forfeitures of territories in the North. This was the 
origin of that great plantation of Scots in Ulster which did so much to give 
the greater part of that province its distinctive character, intensified by the 
Cromwellian settlement half a century later. 

From the very outset of his reign James showed his inability to grasp 
the ideas of government which had become ingrained in the English people — 
ideas which were thoroughly understood by the Tudors and which none of 
them would ever have been tactless enough to ignore. The axioms of 
English constitutionalism had never so much as presented themselves to 
the mind of the Scottish king, because they had no counterpart in the 
country where he had been bred. In England the supremacy of law was 
fundamental, whereas in Scotland arbitrary jurisdictions were the rule. 
Even on his first passage through the northern counties James had horrified 
his new subjects by proposing to hang a pickpocket, taken in the act, out 
of hand, without triaL In somewhat similar fashion he came into collision 
with his first parliament. A constituency returned as one of its members 
one Goodwin, who had been outlawed. The election would have been 
annulled by parliament ; but parliament protested against the infringe- 
ment of its privileges when the king took upon himself to declare the 
election void — all election disputes lay in their right to settle. When the 
king aired his theory of Divine Right and pronounced that they had no 
rights at all except by the king's grace, they replied that if he thought that 
was the case in England, he had been li misinformed." This privilege of the 
Commons was not in fact again brought in question ; but the incident 
illustrated the character of the approaching contest between the Crown and 
parliament. The two parties had respectively assumed two different 
theories of the relation between Crown and parliament which could by 
no means be reconciled, although so long as compromises were possible 
between the will of the king and the will of the parliament a violent 
collision might be deferred. 

Now a situation had been reached in which the normal expenditure of 
the Crown largely exceeded the normal revenue. The Crown had to face 
the painful truth that it could not afford to set parliament at defiance unless 
it could obtain additional revenue without appealing to the Commons for 
supplies. James resorted to a precedent which had actually been set in the 
reign of Queen Mary A new "book of rates" was issued, adding to the 
duties at the ports so as to increase the revenue. A merchant named Bate 
refused to pay the new rates on the ground that they were illegal, but the 
judges pronounced that the " Impositions" as they were call^i were within 
the royal prerogative. The Commons passed a resolution traversing the 
decision of the judges, but a resolution of the House of Commons is merely 



RIGHT DIVINE 391 

an expression of opinion having no legal force ; an Act of parliament, not 
a resolution of one House, is required to invalidate the judgment of the 
courts ; and until such an Act were passed, or the courts reversed their own 
judgment, the decision in Bate's case established the legal right of the 
Crown to vary the customs duties without sanction of parliament. Thus a 
serious constitutional danger was revealed. The judges held office by 
grace of the Crown ; they were appointed and might be removed at the 
will of the Crown ; and so long as this should be the case there was obvi- 
ously a strong presumption, without imputing wilful dishonesty to the 
judges, that their decisions would be biassed in favour of the Crown. As 
concerned the particular question, the extent to which the king might add 
to the Impositions was limited only by the endurance of the House and of 
popular feeling ; he had the law on his side, but if he strained the law the 
consequences might be disastrous. 

Cecil, who was now Earl of Salisbury, sought to devise a remedy by a 
settlement which was called the Great Contract. A number of the king's 
technically valid claims, which were perpetual sources of irritation and 
friction, were to be commuted for a fixed annual revenue, these claims 
including the Impositions and a variety of feudal dues. The scheme seemed 
likely to go through, but unfortunately, while it was under consideration, 
both sides stiffened in their demands, and the Great Contract was dropped, 
since neither would give way. 

The result was that for many years James made shift to carry on the 
government without additional supplies from parliament. During these 
years the Houses were only once summoned, to meet in what was called 
the " Addled Parliament," because it was dissolved again without accom- 
plishing anything whatever. James had to content himself with employing 
every colourable legal device for raising money, including a large extension 
of the practice of granting monopolies or exclusive rights of production and 
sale of particular articles. One ingenious scheme deserves special notice. 
In connection with the colonisation of Ulster, and with a scheme for plant- 
ing Scottish colonists in the district of North America, to which the name 
of Nova Scotia or New Scotland was given, the king created a new order 
of '* baronets," bearers of a hereditary dignity which did not entitle them 
to rank with the peers of the realm, while it carried precedence over 
knights. But the new dignity was conferred not as a reward for services, 
but in exchange for hard cash. 

Ill 

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF JAMES I. 

The king's foreign policy was dominated by a fear of Spain, 'which was 
not shared by the English people. The strife which had continued through 
the last years of Elizabeth was terminated sensibly enough by a peace 



392 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

almost immediately after James's accession. But James was possessed by 
an extravagant obsequiousness to Spain, which led to one of the most 
shameful incidents of the reign. To gratify Spain he deliberately sacrificed 
Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was liberated from the Tower with a per- 
mission to seek and take possession of a hidden land of gold mines, of 
whose existence he had heard on the famous expedition to the Orinoco 
which he had undertaken in Elizabeth's reign. But he had strict orders 
to avoid a collision with the Spaniards. Every one concerned was perfectly 
well aware that a collision with the Spaniards would be absolutely 

inevitable. Raleigh's expedition was a 
failure, and the inevitable collision took 
place. On his return he was arrested, 
and, to gratify the Spaniards, was ex- 
ecuted on the strength of his ancient 
condemnation for complicity in the 
Main plot. At the time of Elizabeth's 
death Raleigh had perhaps been the 
best hated man in the kingdom ; but 
the circumstances of his trial had 
caused a revulsion of sentiment in his 
favour ; he remained the incarnation of 
the old popular feeling of undying 
hostility to Spain ; and, by sacrificing 
him to Spain, James turned him into a 
popular hero. 

James in fact wished to keep on 
good terms with both Catholics and 
Protestants on the Continent. He 
could not realise how completely the 
Spanish Government regarded itself as 
the agent of Heaven for the sup- 
pression of heresy, nor the intensity of religious antagonisms, and he 
wanted himself to be regarded as a Solomon whom every one would 
willingly invite to arbitrate upon their differences. So he married his 
daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick the elector palatine, the head 
of the Calvinistic princes of Germany. He would have tried to marry his 
own heir-apparent, Prince Henry, to a Spanish princess, but Henry had 
made to himself a hero of Raleigh, who was then in the Tower, and would 
have nothing to say to a marriage with any Romanist, least of all a 
Spaniard. The prince's premature death in 1612 made the king's second 
son, Charles, heir to the throne, and presently James revived the idea of 
a Spanish match, which was one of his motives for the destruction of 
Raleigh. He left out of consideration that, on the one hand, Spain cared 
nothing for the match, except as a means to restoring Romanist pre- 
dominance in England, and, on the other, that the English people detested 




Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, died 1612. 
[From Drayton's " Polyolbion."] 



^wy 



RIGHT DIVINE 393 

the idea even more fervently than in the days of Queen Mary. These, 
he held, were high matters of State on which the people had no right 
to an opinion. As f r Spain, he deluded himself with the belief that 
she would be quite satisfied with liberty of conscience for Spaniards 
in England, and some relaxation of the pressure of the penal laws 
upon English Catholics. 
Now matters be- 
came alarmingly com- 
plicated when James's 
son-in-law, the elector 
palatine, accepted the 
crown of Bohemia, 
which was claimed by 
Ferdinand, the emperor- 
elect. The action of the 
Bohemian nobles and of 
Frederick was exceed- 
ingly questionable, since 
the Bohemians had 
actually pledged them- 
selves to accept Ferdi- 
nand, and had broken 
that pledge, though not 
without some excuse, in 
offering their allegiance 
to Frederick. But there 
was the plain fact that 
the son-in-law of the 
King of England was 
plunged into a war with 
the head of the Austrian 
Hapsburgs, that the 
Spanish Hapsburgs were 
in alliance with their cousins, and that there was every prospect that 
Frederick, instead of winning the Bohemian crown, would be deprived 
of the Palatinate. There was also a further probability that this would be 
only a step to an onslaught on the Protestant princes of Germany, who 
had not the wisdom to suppress their own quarrels and present a united 
front to the impending danger. James hated war, and flattered him- 
self that he could detach Spain from the alliance by pressing forward a 
Spanish marriage. A vigorous interposition might have effected something, 
but nothing whatever was to be hoped from a diplomacy which did not 
rely upon armed intervention as its ultimate argument. Frederick's forces 
met with a severe defeat at the White Mountain, in Bohemia, and Spanish 
troops from the Netherlands marched into the Palatinate. 




Dominions oF Spanish Hapsburgs- 
Dominions of Austrian Hapsburgs - 
French and Imperidl Boundaries - 



- ~\ 



European Powers in 1610. 



394 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

If James was to save his son-in-law from complete ruin, it was quite 
clear that he must arm ; and he could not possibly arm without assembling 
a parliament and obtaining supplies. So in 1621 parliament was sum- 
moned ; its last predecessor had been the Addled Parliament of 16 14. As 
matters stood there were two possible war-policies ; one was to take an 
energetic part in the war in Germany, the other was to attack Spain. The 
country was quite willing to attack Spain. It knew little and cared not 
much more about Germany ; it took no interest in the king's German con- 
nections. But if there was going to be a stand-up fight between Rome and 
Protestantism, the traditional course for England was to fasten itself upon 
Rome's traditional champion, Spain ; and war with Spain brought com- 
pensation to adventurers, apart from the comfortable sense that it was a 
smiting of the Amalekites by the chosen people. 

Parliament, however, had not yet reached the stage of claiming to dictate 
the particular course to be followed. The programme set before it was 
negotiation, and war if negotiation failed. It professed enthusiastic accept- 
ance of the programme, especially the second part of it, but voted by no 
means as much money as the king wanted, being very far from confident 
that the subsidies would be expended to its satisfaction. Having voted the 
- money, it turned to accumulated grievances — it had been practically silenced 
for ten years, and since the death of Salisbury in 16 12 the conduct of the 
administration had not commended itself to public favour. 

Fortune had set beside the king a counsellor who understood the 
Tudor principles of statesmanship. But King James was far too sure 
of his own supreme wisdom to allow himself to be guided by the wisdom 
of Francis Bacon, while he allowed himself to be tricked and cajoled 
by favourites, to whom statesmanship meant nothing but personal intriguing 
for wealth and power. Youthful good looks provided a ready passport 
to the royal favour. Cecil had known how to keep such proteges from 
becoming too influential ; the man who had destroyed Essex and ruined 
Raleigh knew how to secure his own ascendency. But after Cecil's death, 
he who desired the king's favour required first the favour of the king's 
favourites. The first of these was Robert Kerr, created Earl of Somerset, 
who was fortunately ruined by the discovery that his wife, with his own 
connivance, had procured the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, who had 
stood in the way of her divorce from the Earl of Essexf which had been 
a necessary preliminary to her marriage with Kerr. Somerset's successor, 
with all his faults, remains a figure with a certain splendid fascination 
if only by reason of his magnificent arrogance. George Villiers, famous 
as the Duke of Buckingham, won the affection first of the king and then 
of his son Charles by his personal beauty and charm. Fearless, confident, 
and entirely self-centred, he never dreamed of doubting his own supreme 
capacity as a statesman and as a soldier ; though politics in his eyes meant 
the punishment of people who had offended him, and he realised no 
difference between the art of the strategist and that of the duellist. 



RIGHT DIVINE 395 

But the country had not yet realised that Buckingham was the king's 
evil genius. It did realise that corruption was rampant. It fastened 
upon monopolies as the great means of corruption, and the Commons 
attacked them so fiercely that Buckingham made a virtue of resigning those 
which he held himself, and inducing the king to bow to the storm and 
abolish them. But the attack went further. If corruption was to be 
effectively dealt with, the highest game should be aimed at. Francis 
Bacon, Lord St. Alban, was the Lord Chancellor, the head of the judicial 
administration, and the Commons were angrily confident that the whole 
judicial administration was corrupt. Accord- 
ing to the exceedingly pernicious practice 
of the time, every judge was in the habit 
of accepting gifts from the suitors on both 
sides. The obvious inference was that their 
decisions were likely to be influenced by the 
relative value of the gifts. In the same way, 
it may be remarked, all through the Tudor 
period, English statesmen and persons of 
influence, from Wolsey down, were in the 
habit of receiving gifts and honours from 
European potentates ; and although the 
thing was done openly, and implied nothing 
in the nature of a bargain, there was an 
obvious danger that the system would be 
utilised for purposes of corruption. Bacon 
then was made the scapegoat of the system 
by the House of Commons. The Lord 
Chancellor was impeached and condemned, 
although there was no evidence that he had ever allowed his decisions 
to be affected by the presents which he received. There is no ground 
whatever for supposing that he was a corrupt judge ; but he lent him- 
self to a system which tended to corruption and maladministration of 
justice, although he recognised himself that a high standard of duty 
would have required him to set his face against it. He admitted the 
justice of his own punishment, while claiming that he had himself been 
the most just of judges since his father's time. His fall has brought 
unmerited obloquy upon his name, but it greatly served the cause of justice 
generally. Its effect may be measured by the fact that since his day 
no judge has ever laid himself open to the charge of receiving bribes. 

Bacon's impeachment revived a practice which had fallen into complete 
abeyance ever since the beginning of the War of the Roses. From the 
impeachment of Lord Latimer, in 1376, to the impeachment of Suffolk, in 
1450, the Commons had employed this method of attacking ministers, 
because the Commons were pressing their own right to control administra- 
tion. The revival of impeachment meant that the Commons were once 




Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban. 

[From the engraving by William Marshall.] 



396 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

more imbued with a determination to enforce that right ; and the practice 
was actively continued until the right itself had become thoroughly 
established in the eighteenth century. 

When parliament was prorogued in the summer, it was still hoped that 
the negotiations would be sufficiently fortified by the proceedings in the 
House to make actual war unnecessary. But matters went so badly for 
Frederick that the prospect of persuading his enemies to come to terms 
vanished ; and at the end of the year parliament was again summoned in a 
hurry to vote supplies. But James was still devoted to his scheme of 
detaching Spain and inducing her to join England in bringing pressure to 
bear on the Emperor and his supporters. The Commons detested the idea 
of the Spanish marriage, had no belief in the possibility of detaching Spain, 
and were extremely averse from flinging themselves into the war on German 
soil instead of devoting the country's energies to a maritime attack on the 
traditional enemy. In their view it was England's business to stand forth 
uncompromisingly as the leader of the Protestant Powers in resistance to 
the Catholic attack. The Commons told the king their mind, and James 
wrathfully told them in return to attend to the business for which they had 
been summoned, instead of expressing opinions upon matters which were 
too high for them. They replied that they were entitled to discuss what- 
soever matters they thought fit. James with his own hands tore the record 
of their resolution out of the journals of the House, and dissolved the 
parliament. 

Again James had to fall back on such shifts for raising money as had 
been declared legal by the Crown lawyers. He reverted to a demand for 
benevolences, concerning which they had pronounced that the request 
might legally be made although it could not be legally enforced. But he 
could not in this fashion furnish forth an army which could save his son- 
in-law. He devised instead the farcical scheme of despatching the Prince 
of Wales incognito, accompanied by Buckingham, with false beards and 
other simple devices for concealing their identity, to Spain, that the Prince 
might woo the Infanta in person. Thus would the King of Spain and the 
Infanta be so charmed that they would willingly concede every request of 
the gallant wooer. Success did not attend this ingenious introduction of 
comic opera into high politics. The prince and the duke got themselves 
to Spain and were politely welcomed. The Infanta was terrified at the idea 
of marrying a heretic ; Charles was totally unfitted for playing the part of a 
romantic adorer, and Buckingham's arrogance enraged the entire Spanish 
court. The conditions of the marriage proposed from England were 
ridiculous from the Spanish point of view, and the Spanish conditions were 
intolerable from the English point of view. Prince and duke returned from 
Spain full of fury and burning for war. For the only time in his life 
Buckingham became popular. 

Now, although James had gone hopelessly astray in imagining that Spain 
could be detached from the Catholic combination, he understood the situa- 



RIGHT DIVINE 397 

tion better than his subjects. Either the Hapsburg Catholic combination 
must be split up or a powerful anti-Hapsburg league must be formed, 
strong enough to beat it. The English parliament did not realise the 
necessity ; it thought only of applying the old Elizabethan method of send- 
ing supports to the United Provinces, which were now fighting the Spaniards 
again, and of renewing the maritime war upon Spain. James then turned 
to the policy of a French alliance and a French marriage, since the Spanish 
alliance and the Spanish marriage had been put out of court. But the 
French marriage also involved that toleration for Romanists in England 
which was an abomination in the sight of English Puritanism. Parliament, 
summoned again, though ready for a Spanish war, viewed the proposals 
for a French marriage with extreme suspicion ; and was not at all inclined 
to vote the huge supplies necessary for a great German campaign, and for 
providing the subsidies which were needed to induce the Lutheran princes 
of Germany to take the part of the Calvinist elector palatine. The supplies 
voted were insufficient ; and when parliament had been prorogued, the 
proposed marriage was negotiated between Charles and the French King's 
sister Henrietta Maria. But to carry through the negotiations, Buckingham 
made concessions on the Catholic question which rendered it impossible 
for him to face parliament again with demands for more money. Parlia- 
ment was not again summoned, and, although there was no money, 
Buckingham promised it right and left and plunged into war without the 
means to carry it on. There was just enough in the treasury to pay for 
raising and despatching to Holland a force of a few thousand men ; but 
when they got there they were left to starve. In a few weeks three-fourths 
of them were dead or dying from starvation, cold, or pestilence. Just at 
this point the old king died. For some time past, however, he had been 
entirely in Buckingham's hands, and Buckingham was no less omnipotent 
with the ill-fated Prince of Wales, who now ascended the throne as 
Charles I. 

IV 

BUCKINGHAM 

The situation was an awkward one for the new king. He was on the 
point of marrying his French bride, and his subjects had still to learn how 
pledges made to them had been traversed by the promises made to the French 
king. He was in desperate need of money to carry on the war in which 
Buckingham had involved the country, and the last incident of the war had 
been an ugly disaster brought about by the grossest mismanagement. An 
appeal to parliament could not be long deferred, and parliament was abso- 
lutely certain, when called, to make itself unpleasant about the duke. The 
duke might despise it, but it held the purse-strings. 

The king did not summon parliament till his marriage was an accom- 



398 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

plished fact. He would have to break some promises, whether those made 
to England or those made to France ; but Henrietta Maria was irrevocably 
his wife, though it was an ill day for England that had made her queen to 
succeed Buckingham as the king's evil genius. Parliament met, angry and 
suspicious. It had separated a twelvemonth before, expecting to be 
summoned in the winter to provide for a campaign in the direction of 
which it would have a considerable voice. It had not been summoned, 
and Buckingham wrought irremediable mischief, with no one to criticise or 

denounce. Criticism and denuncia- 
tion were forthcoming now. The 
war was there, and the war must 
go on, but not under Buckingham's 
direction ; it would be preposterous 
to vote huge sums of money and 
see them recklessly squandered with 
no results. Until the Commons 
saw their way and knew what was 
to be done, until Buckingham ceased 
to dominate the stage, they would 
only vote just enough money for 
safety. They would grant two sub- 
sidies, that is to say, .£140,000. 
When Buckingham was removed, 
they would consider further sup- 
plies, but not till then. The king 
was indignant. What right had the 
Commons to dictate to him the 
ministers in whom he was to trust ? 
He trusted Buckingham, and would 
not dismiss him. Instead he dis- 
solved parliament; at worst he 



J^ 







George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628). 
[After the painting by Mierevelt.] 



had the two subsidies to go on 
with, besides tonnage and poundage which had been granted for a year. 

With the money in hand, Buckingham organised an expedition, hot to 
Holland, but against Spain. At Cadiz, Drake had " singed the king of 
Spain's beard " ; at Cadiz, Raleigh and Essex had again dealt Spain a 
crushing blow ; Cadiz was to be the scene of another glorious triumph. 
But Buckingham had no Raleighs or Drakes to do his work. While he 
went off to Holland to negotiate with German princes, his expedition went 
to Cadiz with crews collected by pressgangs, and captains who knew 
nothing of their business. Having gone to Cadiz, they came home again 
ignominiously, having escaped worse disaster chiefly because they had not 
attempted to do any fighting. It seemed more evident than ever that 
nothing could be done until parliament could be cajoled out of supplies. 
A second parliament was summoned ; Charles hoped to make it amenable 




CHARLES I 
From the original painting by Van Dyck at Windsor. 



RIGHT DIVINE 39$ 

by making sheriffs of the most prominent leaders of the opposition to 
Buckingham, and thereby disqualifying them for election. Their absence 
only gave a greater prominence and a wider influence for a more pure- 
souled patriot than any of them, Sir John Eliot. The new parliament refused 
to discuss supplies until grievances had been redressed. Charles had no 
talent for cajolery or conciliation ; he replied by threats. The Commons 
retorted by resolving to impeach Buckingham. The peers were no friends 
to the duke, and Charles was driven to quash the proceedings by dissolving 
parliament. 

But how was Charles to raise money ? Buckingham was now athirst 
for military glory, and war is an expensive pastime ; not the less expensive 
when the policy of its managers varies from month to month. However, 
the resources, as it seemed, had not been exhausted. The king had a right 
to levy tonnage and poundage ; at least it had been granted for life to every 
other king for two hundred years past, although Charles's own first parlia- 
ment had granted it only for a year and the second parliament had been 
dissolved without granting anything at all. Benevolences were illegal ; at 
least in their legal non-compulsory form they were non-productive. Still, 
compulsory loans might be demanded, and the demand would be difficult 
to resist. So it proved ; but when the demand came before the Chief 
Justice he pronounced it illegal ; whereupon he was removed from office. 

Meanwhile Buckingham had been demonstrating afresh his lack of the 
elements of statesmanship. England had no conceivable justification for 
going to war at all with anybody, except in defence of the king's brother- 
in-law, which % was excusable for family reasons, or in the championship of 
Protestantism against aggressive Romanism, the deliverance of Europe from 
a threatened Hapsburg domination. There was one Power, France, which 
could not indeed be naturally drawn into a Protestant league as such, but 
whose interests were entirely opposed to Hapsburg aggression. There 
was every possible reason for preserving at the very least friendly relations 
with France. But Buckingham chose to quarrel with France, where 
Richelieu's government was embarrassed by the semi-religious civil war 
brought on by the antagonism between the Crown and the Huguenot 
nobility. The seaport of La Rochelle had always been a Huguenot strong- 
hold of the first importance. It was now undergoing a siege. Buckingham, 
neglectful alike of Spain and the Palatinate, resolved to intervene in France 
with a personally conducted expedition, which was to relieve La Rochelle 
by capturing the Isle of Rh6. The duke was no better fitted to command 
than to organise a great military expedition. The Isle of Rhe venture 
was merely a variation on the two previous ventures which had collapsed 
so ignominiously. Half the expeditionary force died, and the rest came 
home again defeated and savage. 

But the whole business was something more than another military failure 
to be added to Buckingham's account. It had been made possible only by 
the forced loans for pronouncing which illegal Chief Justice Crewe had 



4 oo THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

been removed from his office. Men of position who refused to pay had 
been arbitrarily imprisoned by the Council ; poor men who refused to pay 
had been forced to serve in the expedition. Grumblers had been penalised 
by having troops billeted upon them, and, wherever troops were concerned, 
martial law was allowed to supersede civil law. Among the men who had 
been thrown into prison, five knights had demanded a writ of Habeas 
Corpus, requiring that they should be brought up for trial ; but the writ 

had been refused, the judges declaring that the 
king had power to refuse a trial. 

The circumstances were not favourable for the 
summoning of a parliament, yet the king dared 
no longer to struggle on without the substantial 
supplies which it was impossible to obtain without 
a parliamentary grant. Charles summoned his 
third parliament, and it met in angry mood. The 
solid ranks of the opposition were led by the dark 
figure of Thomas Wentworth, by Sir John Eliot, 
the fiery and single-minded champion of liberty, 
and by John Pym, clear-headed, unimpassioned, 
but immovable as Wentworth himself. For the 
moment the attack was not directed against Bucking- 
ham. Personal questions were to be subordinated 
to a direct and decisive assertion of fundamental 
principles. 

According to the now accepted practice, the 
presentation of grievances preceded the discussion 
of supply. The Commons formulated their demand 
in the Petition of Right. There was to be no 
martial law in time of peace. Soldiers were not 
to be miscellaneously billeted, and wherever they 
were quartered they must pay their way. No man 
was to be compelled to make or yield any ''gift, 
loan, benevolence, tax, or suchlike charge " without 
common consent by Act of parliament. No freeman was to be im- 
prisoned except on cause shown, or was to be detained in prison without 
trial. If these principles were established by Statute, it seemed to the 
leaders of the Commons that the endangered liberties of the nation would 
be safeguarded. With that security they were prepared to vote as much 
as five subsidies, or £350,000. 

The questions of billeting and martial law presented no serious diffi- 
culties to the mind of the king. There were loopholes in the clause 
concerning taxation, which it was rather his business to avoid pointing 
out, so that it would be wise to accept that clause without too much 
demur ; but he was exceedingly reluctant to give way on the point of 
arbitrary imprisonment. The Lettre de Cachet was being used by Richelieu 




A Cavalier of 1620. 
[From Skelton's "Armour."] 



RIGHT DIVINE 401 

in France as a very powerful instrument for the repression of the nobility, 
and the concentration of power in the hands of the Crown. In England 
the judges had just affirmed that it was within the royal prerogative to 
order the imprisonment of the king's subjects without stating any charge 
against them. If a charge were stated they could demand to be tried on 
that charge ; if no charge were stated they could claim neither trial 
nor release. The principle at stake was absolutely vital. The Lords 
supported the Commons, and the king found himself obliged to give 
way. The Petition of Right took its place in the Statute Book, the 
subsidies were voted, bonfires blazed, and joybells pealed. England 
imagined that the victory of the Commons was won. 

England was mistaken. The battle was but just joined. Charles had 
given way for the moment in order to get his subsidies ; means would 
be found for making the Petition of Right a dead letter or something 
very near it. At the moment, however, the Commons proceeded to the 
serious business of attacking Buckingham, which had only been postponed 
because the assertion of principles demanded the leading place. A 
Remonstrance was drawn up which was in fact a detailed indictment of 
the duke and a demand for his removal. But Charles was amenable only 
so long as his treasury was empty. He met the Remonstrance by pro- 
roguing parliament, and ostentatiously displaying his confidence in the 
duke. A new expedition was already in preparation for the relief of 
La Rochelle, and Buckingham was sent down to Portsmouth to take 
command of the fleet. The Petition of Right received the royal assent 
on June 7th, s the subsidies were voted on the 12th, and on the 26th 
parliament was prorogued. 

In the interval between these two latter dates the fact that peace had 
not been achieved became manifest. Parliament proceeded with the 
deferred attack upon Buckingham by drawing up its Remonstrance, and it 
also proceeded with a bill to grant the king tonnage and poundage for one 
year. Now in this lay the crux of the financial question. Was it or was 
it not within the king's right to levy that impost ? Parliament assumed 
that it was not. The king assumed that it was. Hitherto he had acted on 
that assumption throughout his reign. The claim of the Commons was an 
exceedingly doubtful one. In the first place, for two hundred years the 
grant had been made as a matter of form at the beginning of every reign 
for the whole period of the reign. Even if it were assumed that the 
Commons had never technically surrendered their right to withhold that 
grant, the attempt to exercise a technical right which had been in abeyance 
for two hundred years was doubtfully constitutional. Further, the Law 
Courts were the appointed authority for interpreting the law ; in Bate's 
case the judges' decision for the Crown covered tonnage and poundage. 
-The Commons had indeed passed a traversing resolution, but the resolution 
of one chamber could not override the authority of the Courts. Thirdly, 
when the Commons in 1625 had departed from precedent and made the 

2 C 



4 o2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

grant for one year only, the Lords had rejected the bill because of the 
unconstitutional limitation. Obviously then the king had an exceedingly 
strong case for his view. Further, if tonnage and poundage fell within 
the prerogative before the Petition of Right, no difference was made by the 
Statute ; because according to the king's argument, and according to the 
claim of the Commons in presenting the petition, it deprived the king of 
no existing prerogatives, but was an Act declaratory of the existing law. 

No mention had been made in the petition 
itself of indirect taxes, but only of specified 
forms of taxation against which the Com- 
mons had an adequate case as being 
opposed to constitutional practice. The 
only possible retort for the Commons was 
that the phrase "or other such charge" 
was intended to cover indirect taxation ; 
that the king was perfectly well aware 
that this was the meaning of the Commons ; 
and that in assenting to the petition he 
was accepting the doctrine of the Com- 
mons that the legal decision in Bate's case 
had been wrong and that the practice of 
two hundred years had not deprived the 
House of a right which it had always held 
in reserve. To the plain man the plain 
fact would appear to be that both the 
Crown and the Commons shirked the 
issue in the Petition of Right, and left the 
taxation clauses intentionally indefinite, 
because each party intended to insist on 
its own interpretation of the indefinite 
phrase as part and parcel of the terms 
on which the subsidies had been granted. 
Each hoped indirectly to score the victory on the vital point which both 
thoroughly recognised. The king would be completely under the financial 
control of the Commons if he had annually to obtain their authority for 
levying indirect taxes ; which was precisely what the Commons were bent 
on securing and the king was bent on avoiding. 

Such, then, was the position of affairs when the House of Commons 
sent up its Tonnage and Poundage Bill accompanied by a declaration 
that the levying of the impost without parliamentary authority had 
been illegal. The king met the Commons with a flat refusal to 
accept the bill, or to surrender his constitutional right to levy tonnage 
and poundage without parliament's consent. He was able to do so, 
because the subsidies were already secured. The weight of opinion 
undoubtedly favours the view that Charles was technically in the right, 




An Infantryman of 1625. 
[From Skelton's " Armour."] 



RIGHT DIVINE 4°3 

and that on this question the Commons were the innovators, not the 
Crown. 

Nor was this the only blow suffered by parliament in the month of 
June 1628. Both in the first and in this, the third, parliament of the reign, 
the foremost champion of the Commons and the foremost enemy of 
Buckingham had been Thomas Wentworth. A week after the Petition of 
Right became law, Wentworth's colleagues, comrades, and followers learnt 
with dismay and alarm that he had been created a baron, which could only 
mean that he had left the leadership of the Commons to enter the service 
of the Crown. The moment when he resolved on the momentous change, 
and his motives for making it, are so obscure that they present an almost 
insoluble riddle. The leading champion of popular liberties, the most 
implacable foe of the Buckingham regime, the man most feared by the 
court, was suddenly transformed into the most relentless champion of the 
royal power since Thomas Cromwell, and the most contemptuous of parlia- 
mentary rights. And the change took place, not after Buckingham's fall, 
but at the moment when he was in the zenith of his power. No explana- 
tion at all is even plausible, unless we assume that Wentworth had con- 
vinced himself that Buckingham's fall was imminent ; for it was equally 
impossible that he should have hoped to supplant Buckingham in the 
king's favour by his own influence, or that he should have been prepared 
to act either as the subordinate or the colleague of the duke ; nor is it less 
impossible that a man of his character could have been bribed by a title 
to change sides. He must have reckoned that tb,2 combination of arro- 
gance and incompetence in the duke were making his fall daily more in- 
evitable. He must have been confident that he himself would secure the 
position of the supreme minister. We may, then, adopt the view of his 
old comrades and colleagues, that if he had any principles he sank them to 
gratify personal ambition, seeing himself a mightier man as the king's 
minister, without a rival among the minions of the Court, than as sharing 
the leadership of the people with Eliot and Pym. We may, as an alternative, 
believe that Wentworth was a patriot who, coming to man's estate in the 
year of the Addled Parliament, became firmly convinced that the increasing 
claims of the Crown must be curbed ; that he held to that conviction, and 
strove his hardest for the legitimate authority of parliament until the full 
claims for liberty were formulated in the Petition of Right. Just at this 
stage he realised that 'a balance of parliamentary and royal powers was un- 
attainable ; that the hot-headed Eliot and the cold-hearted Pym would end by 
creating a parliamentary tyranny ; that the one chance for the country was 
for a strong man to come to the support of the Crown, to render it absolute, 
and to provide the brain and hand which, when the Crown was once 
made absolute, should render despotism beneficent. There is, in fact, 
, .nothing incredible about the development, in a statesman of the first rank, 
of a change from a democratic to an absolutist attitude, of a gradual 
passage from one political pole to the other. The amazing thing about 



4 04 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Wentworth is that the change of attitude was made in a week, and the 
change was to all appearance a total reversal. But finally, it is conceivable 
that Wentworth took the same view of the Petition of Right itself as the 
king, that he never intended a further limitation of the prerogative, and 
that the attitude of his colleagues on the Tonnage and Poundage Bill not 
only failed to command his adherence, but drove him into the opposite 
camp. Whatever explanation we may adopt of Wentworth's conduct, the 
fact remained that he aroused in his old colleagues an overwhelming inten- 
sity of hatred as the supreme traitor and apostate. " You have left us," 
said Pym to him — so runs the story — some four months later ; " we will 
never leave you while your head is on your shoulders." 

Not perhaps in the fashion that Wentworth had anticipated the blow 
fell which hurled Buckingham out of his path. A certain John Felton had 
served as a lieutenant in the Cadiz Expedition. When Buckingham's force 
went to the Isle of Rh6, he had asked for a captaincy, which the duke 
scornfully refused him. Thence he had returned to England brooding 
over his personal wrongs, sick at heart, and savage, like all his comrades, 
over the sufferings and the disgrace in which the whole force had been 
involved. Touched with religious mania, he became possessed with the 
idea that he was the appointed destroyer of the detested enemy of the 
people. At Portsmouth he succeeded in making his way into Buckingham's 
apartments and, as the duke stepped out of his room, stabbed him to the 
heart. The assassin was seized and haled away to his doom ; he had 
done his work of deliverance, and it was nothing to him that his own life 
was forfeit ; nay, it was his privilege to have smitten down the tyrant and 
the oppressor, and for that his own life was a light enough price to pay. 
All over England the news of his deed was hailed with an outburst of 
savage jubilation which was never forgotten or forgiven by the king who 
had loved his splendid favourite as he never loved another man. 



V 

PURITANISM 

On the question of arbitrary imprisonment it appeared that the 
Commons had won their battle. On the question of taxation, it was made 
abundantly clear at the moment of the prorogation that they had not won. 
But there was a third question with regard to which there had not as yet 
been a violent collision between the Crown and the Commons, but which 
nevertheless had been for some time past fermenting in men's minds, and 
was now about to be placed in the forefront of dispute. This was the 
religious question. And here, as in the question of taxation, we have to 
realise that the quarrel arose because the Crown strained, in defiance of 
popular sentiment, powers which the Tudors had exercised almost without 



RIGHT DIVINE 405 

question, because both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth had been careful not to 
go beyond the limits of popular acquiescence. And in this respect James I. 
had on the whole followed the example of his predecessors. 

In England the country, in the reign of Henry VIII., had accepted the 
general principles that uniformity of religion was to be enforced, that the 
formulas of uniformity must have the sanction of the State, and that the 
supreme ecclesiastical authority of the State was the Crown. The Crown 
preserved the old episcopal organisation of church government as a matter 
of course. The uniformity which was insisted on permitted of a wide 
latitude of doctrine and of an appreciable 
variety in ceremonial. With this the mass 
of the people had been content. The limit 
of latitude in the direction of Roman 
doctrine was set primarily by' the an- 
tagonism to the assertion of any claim 
to authority within the realm by any ex- 
ternal potentate, whether spiritual or secular. 
When the popular mind learnt to associate 
particular doctrines or practices with alle- 
giance to the pope, it became hotly an- 
tagonistic to those doctrines and practices. 
In the other direction, the popular mind 
was generally disposed to resent an attitude 
which challenged lawful authority. Popular 
sentiment sympathised with demands for 
increased latitude, but not with their aggres- 
sive expression, and so long as Noncon- 
formity was unaggressive, popular sentiment 
was opposed to its aggressive repression. 

Now popular opinion had approved or acquiesced in the rigorous re- 
pressive action of the State in the reign of Elizabeth at the time of the 
Martin Mar- Prelate pamphlets, when Nonconformity adopted a violently 
aggressive attitude and thereby lost the popular sympathy which was being 
drawn to it in reaction against the arbitrary methods of Whitgift and the 
Court of High Commission. The Hampton Court Conference on the other 
hand, with its immediate results, made the set of popular feeling favourable 
to the Nonconformists. Gunpowder Plot, the Catholic marriage projects, 
and the attempts to relax the penal laws against Romanists, all tended to 
foster and intensify the alarmed hatred of Romanism and the unpopularity 
of the specific doctrines and practices which were looked upon as akin to 
those of Rome. But what King James cared about most was insistence on 
the authority of an episcopate intimately associated with the monarchy ; 
- and during the greater part of his reign bishops as a body were rather 
Calvinistic in their theology, and were not irritatingly strict in their insist- 
ence on unpopular details of ceremonial. 




[From a miniature drawing by Matthew 
Sneiling, 1647.] 



4 o6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Thus circumstances combined to develop Puritanism. Now the 
essential characteristic of Puritanism is the vivid consciousness of an 
immediate personal relation between the individual and his Maker, which 
recognises no mediator between God and man except the Son of God, who 
is both God and man. No Church, no hierarchy of saints, can be inter- 
posed between the soul and God. There is no ordained channel for 
the Divine Grace, which must be sought directly by prayer and the study 
of God's Word, God revealed in the Scriptures. Of that Word there is no 
infallible interpreter ; the only interpreter is the individual himself, guided 
by the Spirit of God. The individual, therefore, must in all things be 
guided by the inward monitor. Puritanism is, in short, the principle of 
individualism carried to its highest pitch in matters of religion. 

But Puritanism in the seventeenth century, when it searched the 
Scriptures, turned to the Old Testament rather than the New. It believed 
very emphatically in prophets, and its prophet par excellence was Calvin. 
Its primary dogma was that of Predestination, a grim creed which tends 
to make its adherents absolutely fearless of what man can do to them, but, 
while it fills them with the fear of God, does not greatly tend to inspire 
them with a love of His creatures. So Puritanism dwells upon the Power 
of an offended God and the Righteousness of His Judgments rather than 
upon His Love and His Mercy. And an Old Testament Puritanism 
contained a grave element of political danger to monarchy ; since neither 
the institution of monarchy among the Hebrews nor its persistence, nor the 
attitude of the Prophets to the Kings, suggest a high conception of 
royalty. 

Logically it would appear that Puritanism ought to be tolerant. If 
there is no authority except Scripture, and no interpreter of Scripture ex- 
cept the individual, there can be no arbiter between individuals, no 
one who can impose his own judgment upon his neighbour, and every 
man must be left to follow his own conscience. Accordingly it was 
among the Puritans that the doctrine of toleration was first maintained 
as distinct from the doctrine of comprehension. Unqualified toleration 
leaves opinion absolutely free. A qualified toleration may repress the ex- 
pression of opinions, not on the ground that they are false, but because 
their dissemination is injurious to public order; on the ground, that is, not 
of religious truth but of political expediency. Comprehension, on the other 
hand, draws a distinction between things fundamental and things indifferent, 
and is under no obligation to tolerate variations of opinion with regard to 
fundamentals. Comprehension, not toleration, is the normal attitude of a 
State Church. But the Puritan may interpret his position in two ways. If 
he admits his own fallibility, he is logically bound to leave to his neighbour 
the same right of private judgment which he claims for himself. Yet the 
Puritan may claim infallibility for himself, having assurance of the direct 
guidance of the Spirit. It follows, then, that any one who thinks differently 
from himself is not under the guidance of the Spirit, and therefore has no 



RIGHT DIVINE 407 

claim to toleration. Hence Puritanism could also display a supreme 
intolerance, rendered additionally offensive by its egotism. Again, Puritan- 
ism is not essentially connected with any particular form of ecclesiastical 
organisation. It is perfectly compatible with an Episcopalian, a Presby- 
terian, or a Congregational system. It can accept creeds infinitely various. 
We may then sum up the Puritanism of the seventeenth century by 
saying that it was predestinarian in its creed, that it drew its public morals 
from the Old Testament, that its personal morals were of an extreme 
austerity, and that it identified the Papacy with the Scarlet Woman of the 
Apocalypse. It was disposed to be anti-prelatical, partly because it regarded 
the old system as being too nearly akin to that of Rome, partly because the 
Episcopate was presented as a means of subjecting the things of the Spirit 



?orl»mt*r Hou<« 



VtaHtff 



the AM-y 



V^fclllln 







Westminster in the time of Charles I. 

[From a print by Hollar.] 

to the arm of the flesh ; whereas the Puritan advocates of Presbyterianism 
regarded that system as a means of subjecting the arm of the flesh to 
spiritual control. But Puritanism was not to be identified with Presby- 
terianism, nor did it become definitely antagonistic in England to the 
episcopal system until the Episcopate itself took on a new colour in the 
reign of Charles I. 

The head and front of the movement in the Church which aroused the 
bitter hostility of Puritanism was William Laud, who was raised to his first 
bishopric, that of St, Davids, by James I. under pressure from Buckingham 
and the Prince of Wales. The old king yielded to the young men, but not 
without a warning grumble that trouble would come of it, not in his day but 
in theirs. Just so also he warned them against their folly in encouraging 
the impeachment of Middlesex, the Treasurer, who was opposed to the war 
- with Spain on which the duke and the prince as well as the Commons had 
set their hearts. They would find they had more than enough of impeach- 
ments without going out of their way to encourage them. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The old king's warning came true. In his time Puritanism in general 
acquiesced sombrely while appointments were given to prelates with Puritan 
sympathies. A few of that sect who called themselves Independents de- 
manded a liberty of worship which they could only obtain by migrating to 
Holland or Denmark, and when a band of them, joined by some associates 
from England, sailed in the Mayflower and set up in North America that 
community which became the nucleus of the New England States, they 
were readily granted a charter, as having provided an outlet for a class of 
persons who were rather troublesome to the authorities ; but a more active 

interference with the liberty of worship 
was required at home before a demand 
for greater freedom gave a strong im- 
pulse to emigration. The pressure came 
when Charles ascended the throne and 
the higher ecclesiastical appointments 
were habitually appropriated to the dis- 
ciples of, that school of which Laud was 
the leader. 

The laxity of discipline prevalent 
under King James disappeared. The 
lower clergy took their tone from the 
fathers of the Church. Breaches of the 
law were no longer overlooked or con- 
doned. Unfamiliar doctrines were heard 
from the pulpits. Sermons became ex- 
positions of the divine authority of kings. 
The accustomed dogma of predestina- 
tion began to be displaced in the pulpits 
by those less rigid views which are called 
Arminian from their great exponent the Dutch Doctor "Arminius." The 
new school, while repudiating the Roman authority, emphasised the claim of 
the Church in England to be a branch of the Catholic Church, while denying 
that title to those Churches which had not maintained the continuity of 
episcopal ordination. They emphasised tradition, the authority of the early 
fathers, and the rulings of the four first General Councils. To the Puritans all 
these things were the inventions of priestcraft, innovations, insidious methods 
by which English Protestantism was to be seduced into the snares of Rome. 
Each one of Charles's parliaments lifted up its voice against the new teachers, 
and still while old Archbishop Abbott remained the Primate the Crown 
seemed likely to be restrained from using the Church as its own instrument. 
But in 1628 control over the licensing of publications was transferred 
from the archbishop to a commission which was practically managed by 
Laud, who was made Bishop of London. An attack in the Commons upon 
Mainwaring and Montague, two of the clergy who had just identified them- 
selves with the most extreme doctrines of Absolutism as a part of the Divine 




Archbishop Laud. 
[After the portrait by Vandyck.] 



RIGHT DIVINE 4°9 

Order, was followed by the promotion of both. The king had made 
the Church his ally in the constitutional struggle, while parliament and 
Puritanism were ranged together in antagonism to the Crown and to 
the authority of the bishops represented by Laud. 



VI 




RULE WITHOUT PARLIAMENT 

The prorogued parliament assembled again early in 1629. Buckingham 
was dead, but Wentworth was already a minister of the Crown, having 
been appointed to the Presidency 
of the Council of the North. 
Montague, censured by the Com- 
mons, had been preferred to the 
Bishopric of Chichester. Laud's 
activities as the new Bishop of 
London were in full play. The 
king had been levying tonnage 
and poundage as in the past ; the 
goods of sundry merchants had 
been seized on their refusal to 
pay the duty, and among them 
was a member of parliament, 
John Rolles. In the existing 
state of tension it was easy 
enough for the Commons to be- 
lieve that they had been tricked 
and betrayed by the king. The king had a still better right to declare that 
his own conduct had been unimpeachable, and that the attitude of the 
Commons was wholly unconstitutional. 

The elasticity of an unwritten constitution enables the machinery to 
work with an admirable ease so long as mutual understanding, good temper, 
and the spirit of accommodation prevail. But now questions had come to 
the front with regard to which the respective powers of the Crown and the 
parliament were debatable, each side being determined to push its own 
claim to the utmost. Instead of mutual understanding there was mutual 
distrust, and both sides were irritated and out of temper. As a matter of 
fact, the king was more disposed to accommodation than the exasperated 
Commons, who adopted a directly provocative course ; and both Commons 
and king went on to set the conventions of the constitution at naught. 

The Commons opened by declaring themselves to be in effect the 
judges of what was or was not orthodox in religion, and attacked the 
"innovations" of the clergy who had reverted to customs which were 



A lady in her chair. 
[From a MS. (1603-1638) in the Sloane Collection, British Museum.] 



4 io THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

looked upon as papistical. They summoned the innovators to give an 
account of themselves before the House, and in the meantime turned their 
attention to tonnage and poundage. The king had made the offer, reason- 
able enough in itself, that if the Commons would act according to precedent 
and vote him the duties for the term of the reign, he would waive the 
question of right. This was, in fact, the vital question, and it was the issue 
on which Pym wished to fight ; for, unless the Commons could recover 
that control over tonnage and poundage which had been in abeyance for 
two hundred years, the king would be able to command a sufficient 
revenue to carry on the government after a fashion without appealing to 
parliament for aid. But Pym was overruled by Eliot, and the Commons 
elected to fight on the question of privilege involved by the seizure of the 
goods of a member of parliament. The officers who had seized the goods 
were summoned to the bar of the House ; the king forbade them to obey 
the summons, since they had only acted in obedience to his orders. He 
ordered the House to adjourn till March 2nd. In the interval he en- 
deavoured to negotiate with leading members. The negotiations failed. 
When the House met, Eliot moved three resolutions : against innovations 
in religion and the introduction of unorthodox opinion ; against all persons 
who should be concerned in the levying of tonnage and poundage without 
direct parliamentary sanction ; against all persons who should pay tonnage 
and poundage if it should be so demanded. All such persons were declared 
to be enemies of the king. Before the resolution could be moved the 
Speaker, Finch, announced that he had orders to adjourn the House again. 
But two of the members held him forcibly in the chair. The House broke 
out into wild disorder ; one of the members locked the door and put the 
key in his pocket. When comparative calm had been restored, the Speaker 
refused to put the resolutions to the House. The king's troops were 
approaching to compel the assembly to disperse. While the Speaker was 
held in the chair, Holies, a member, read the resolutions. They were 
carried by acclamation. Then the doors were unlocked and the members 
poured out. Their dispersion was followed by the announcement that the 
parliament was dissolved. 

Eleven years passed before another parliament met. The king took his 
stand upon his legal rights. The Petition of Right did not bar him from 
exercising to the full the statutory powers of the arbitrary Courts which 
could override the Common Law — the Courts of Star Chamber, of High 
Commission, and of the Councils of the North and of Wales. These Courts 
were in effect ready to do the Royal bidding. For the punishment of Eliot 
and his most prominent supporters it was unnecessary to appeal even to 
those Courts. They were charged in the King's Bench with riot and sedition. 
They pleaded privilege of parliament, declaring that the House alone had 
jurisdiction with regard to matters which took place in parliament. The 
objection was overruled on the ground that riot and sedition could not be 
a part of parliamentary proceedings. Eliot refused to admit the juris- 



RIGHT DIVINE 411 

diction, and was thrown into prison, where he was shamefully treated, and 
died after three years. 

The resolutions of the House of Commons could not touch the 
actual legality of the levying of tonnage and poundage, and the Courts 
maintained that the Petition of Right covered only those forms of direct 
taxation which were specifically enumerated therein. The king then could 
carry on his government after a fashion, by straining to the utmost every 
right which the Courts would maintain, but only with a strictly economical 
expenditure. To carry on Buckingham's French war was impossible, and 
terms of peace were soon arrived at, since the war itself was a quite un- 
justifiable intervention on the 
part of England in French 
affairs. Richelieu was victorious 
over the Huguenots, but he 
used his victory with unexpected 
moderation, maintaining the 
principle of toleration. English 
Protestantism was therefore not 
irritated by the peace. Inter- 
vention in Germany was also 
not possible, but this mattered 
the less, because in 1630 Gus- 
tavus Adolphus of Sweden, the 
greatest soldier of the day, threw 
his sword into the Protestant 
scale. Thenceforth England and 
Scotland were affected by the Thirty Years' War only because a large 
number of adventurers, principally Scots, learnt the art of war as mercenaries 
in the armies of the Swedish king. 

For the first few years of his government without parliament Charles 
was indebted to the ingenious financial management of his Treasurer, 
Weston, who discovered fresh legal devices for procuring funds, and suc- 
cessfully prevented the king from plunging into impossible expenditure. 
Weston was the useful man of business who found the supplies for 
carrying on the king's government ; the government itself was carried 
on mainly by Wentwprth and Laud. 

The Council of the North had been established in the time of Henry VIII. 
to replace the old system of government of the Border Counties — in 
other words, of England north of the H umber. Its institution had been 
the outcome of the Pilgrimage of Grace. It had been endowed with 
large arbitrary powers, and the sway of its president was now almost 
despotic. Wentworth was a despot who ruled without fear or favour, but 
crushed all opposition with an iron hand. As between subjects, he enforced 
law untouched by considerations of the wealth, power, or influence of the 
persons concerned. As between the Crown and the subject, he enforced 




The Old " Star Chamber." 

[Pulled down after the burning of old Houses of Parliament. ] 



4 i2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the will of the government without any respect to law at all. Between 
subjects, stern impartial justice was to be dealt out ; between Crown and 
the subject, justice was not in question ; all that the subject received was 
by grace of the Crown. In the north of England, however, Wentworth's 
rule was brief ; in 1633 he was transferred to Ireland. 

In Ireland Wentworth played the despot very much to the benefit 
of the country in which he ruled. Comparative peace had indeed de- 
scended on the land since the stormy days of 
Elizabeth ; but it was an ill ordered peace. In 
Wentworth's view, what the country needed was 
a ruler with an iron will and an efficient army 
to enforce that will. Resistance was to be paralysed, 
and justice was to be dealt out on the lines already 
described. Disorder and violence, except violence 
in the king's service or by the king's servants, was 
to be sharply repressed and punished. Magnates 
were to find no favour merely because they were 
magnates. The great lesson to be inculcated was 
that of obedience to the supreme authority. Went- 
worth could not dispense with the Irish Parlia- 
ment, but he could make it subservient. He got 
from it the money which enabled him to muster 
and train a disciplined army. Competent men 
were appointed to administrative offices ; under 
the Deputy's fostering care industry and com- 
merce began to flourish as they had never 
flourished before; in particular the Irish linen 
manufacture began to achieve that pre-eminence 
which it has maintained ever since. 

But the fatal flaw in Wentworth's system lay 
in his principle that neither law nor promises 
were binding on the Crown. What Wentworth 
thought good to do, that he did, though it might 
involve the breaking of solemn pledges. The general result was that 
Wentworth made himself absolute master in Ireland, and had in his own 
hands probably the most efficient military force in the three kingdoms. 
The Ireland over which he ruled was rapidly achieving a material prosperity 
for which there was no precedent ; but it was an Ireland which felt itself 
to be enslaved, and the greater part of Ireland preferred its accustomed 
anarchy to a prosperous slavery. 

While the one strong man on the king's side was ruling in Ireland on 
the principles which he called by the name of " Thorough," an obstinate 
man was controlling the king's ecclesiastical counsels in England, also on 
the principles of Thorough. Laud, who became archbishop at about the 
time when Wentworth went to Ireland, was bent on establishing the 




A Pikeman, 1635. 

[From Skelton's "Armour."] 



RIGHT DIVINE 413 

supremacy of his own ecclesiastical views, views which were detestable in the 
eyes of the whole body of Puritans. While he was Bishop of London he 
had been content to enforce a strict conformity throughout his own diocese, 
while his power was otherwise felt chiefly through the supreme influence 
which he exercised in the control of ecclesiastical preferments which were 
confined to the men of his own school. As archbishop he exercised to the 
full the authority of the Primate of England. The clergy were required to 
encourage the treatment of Sunday as a Feast Day, which to the Puritan 
was scandalous. The Communion Table of the Puritan churches again 
acquired the character of an Altar. Every detail of the ritual which Laud 
himself loved was forced upon the Puritan clergy, and those who were 
recalcitrant were fined or deprived. Quite erroneously, belief gathered 
ground that Laud was preparing the way for a reunion with Rome. True, 
he had rejected the cardinal's hat which had twice been offered to him, 
but the popular mind seized upon the fact, not that it had been rejected 
but that it had been offered. The conventional English Puritanism 
was based upon what may be called the No Popery sentiment more 
than upon any reasoned theological convictions, and nothing was more 
certain to arouse popular hostility than an alarm of Popery. The con- 
ventional Puritanism had not yet assumed the garb of ascetic austerity ; 
there had been no demonstrations when John Prynne was first penalised 
for making a violent attack upon the stage and all its works ; but now 
when he and two other Puritans were set in the pillory for writing violent 
pamphlets against the Church Government, the victims of the Court of 
High Commission received a popular ovation. Laud's innovations or 
revivals had set the Puritan tide flowing. 

Weston's financial devices were impolitic, mainly because they were 
palpable tricks which happened to touch in an irritating manner classes of 
the community whose goodwill the king would have done well to cultivate. 
Thus he had enraged the whole group of moderate landowners by dis- 
covering that all who had a -£40 holding had been legally bound to take 
up knighthood at the king's coronation, and were technically liable to a 
heavy fine (which was now enforced) if they had neglected to do so. But 
Weston's methods were strictly within the letter of the law ; no one could 
claim that they were illegal. Now, although there was peace with France 
there were some alarms lest the peace should not last, and the Government 
became anxious to strengthen the fleet for coast defence. All precedent 
warranted the issuing of an order to the ports to provide ships, or a cash 
equivalent for ships, for this purpose, when war was in progress or was 
imminent. Ship-money, therefore, was levied on the ports in accordance 
with precedent. But Weston died in 1635, and the counsellors about the 
king's person were mere courtiers. The king wanted more money and 
more ships, and an order was issued contrary to all precedent requiring 
inland towns to pay ship-money. There was no answer to the argument 
that naval defence ought to be paid for by inland towns just as much as 



4i 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

by seaports ; but there was also no answer to the other argument, that no 
law or precedent could be found for imposing this particular tax. The 
demand was immediately challenged ; the king obtained from the judges a 
decision in his favour, the weight of which was materially diminished by 
the fact that in the course of the reign three judges had been suspended or 
dismissed for giving decisions adverse to the king. The pronouncement, 
however, was published all over the country, but the authority for collecting 
the levy was directly challenged by John Hampden, who carried the case 
before the Court of Exchequer. Of the twelve judges, five supported 

Hampden, but of the 
five, three did so on 
purely technical 
grounds. Seven main- 
tained the claim of the 
Crown, on the express 
ground that the Crown 
had the right to de- 
mand whatever money 
was required for the 
defence of the realm, 
and that it lay with the 
Crown to judge what 
money was required 
for that purpose. It 
was palpable that if 
that judgment held 
good there was no 
limit to the amount of 
money that Charles 
could raise on the pretext that it was required for the defence of the 
realm. Yet the nation could only rage in silence ; it had no mouthpiece, 
for it had no parliament. 

But we must turn now to those complications in the northern kingdom 
of Scotland which at last drove Charles once more to summon an English 
parliament. 




Cheapside and the Cross in 1638. 

[From a contemporary account of the entry of Marie of Medici, mother of Henrietta 
Maria, Queen of Charles L, into London.] 



VII 

SCOTLAND 



In England the system of government was fixed partly by statutes 
explicitly defining the respective powers of the Crown and of the Estates 
or parliament, and partly upon conventions. There was no question 
in the mind of any man that the explicit provisions of the statutes must 



RIGHT DIVINE 415 

not be over-ridden ; there was no question that an established convention 
ought not to be over-ridden. A constitutional problem was presented only 
when the real bearings of the convention were a matter of doubt, when 
the Crown exercised in defiance of the popular will powers which had 
hitherto been exercised in conformity with the popular will. The system, 
that is, worked satisfactorily so long as Crown and parliament were in 
agreement ; when they were in disagreement disputes arose as to the 
actual extent of the powers which the conventions conveyed to one party 
or the other. But in England there existed in parliament a definite 
body which was the legal mouthpiece of public sentiment ; a body more- 
over which could compel the Crown to give at least a degree of considera- 
tion to popular sentiment through its power of withholding additional 
supplies, of which the Crown habitually stood in need over and above 
its normal revenue. 

Now in Scotland there was no such balance of constitutional powers ; 
parliamentary institutions were undeveloped. There was a parliament, but 
in practice it had become a body merely for registering the decrees of 
the Government. The Government itself was conducted through the 
committees which had been known as the Lords of the Articles, whose 
composition was very largely controlled by the faction among the nobles 
which was for the time being in the ascendant. The dissensions and 
rivalries of the magnates had then enabled the " kingcraft " of King James 
VI. to convert the governing body into a privy council of the Crown's 
own nominees. The parliament was practically powerless, because the 
small public expenditure made the Crown virtually independent of the 
control exercised in England by a body which could refuse supplies until 
grievances were considered. The body most nearly representative of 
popular feeling was the General Assembly of the Kirk, which possessed 
neither legislative nor financial powers. The weak point in the absolutism 
of the Crown lay in the difficulty of enforcing its will upon defiant or 
reluctant magnates who could not easily be crushed by force, or upon 
a population with whom magnates were disposed to make common cause. 
So long as the magnates were in tolerable accord with each other and 
with the Crown, the Crown could take its own course 

In England the State control over religion was not in question ; the 
question we have seen coming to the fore was whether that control should 

. be exercised by the Crown or by parliament ; and the Episcopal system went 
far to ensure that it should be exercised by the Crown. In Scotland, however, 
the Reformation had taken a different course. It had been forced upon 
the Crown by the people instead of being imposed on a not unwilling 
people by the Crown, as had been the case in England. The system 
adopted was rooted in Calvinism, and demanded " spiritual independence." 

- It produced a Presbyterian system and a Presbyterian ministry who 
claimed an authority in things spiritual free from State control, and sought 
to extend spiritual dominion into the political sphere ; whereas in England 



41 6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Calvinism was merely a graft, hitherto admitted only so far as it was 
content to recognise the controlling authority of the State, in practice 
at least if not in theory. These claims the kingcraft of James VI. had 
enabled him to combat effectually. Before he became King of England 
as well as of Scotland he had succeeded in establishing the Royal authority 
within the General Assembly itself and in regrafting Episcopacy upon 
the Presbyterian system. He had succeeded, because the magnates were 
with him in opposition to the claims of the Presbyterian ministry, and 
because in his campaign against the preachers he had been careful not to 

run counter to the 
interests of the mag- 
nates. 

This policy Tames 
maintained through- 
out his reign. It was 
his persistent aim to 
recast the Scottish 
Ecclesiastical polity 
on Prelatical lines, 
and to assimilate the 
Church in Scotland to 
the Church in Eng- 
land. He was wise 
enough not to go so 
fast as to arouse 
violent popular hos- 
tility, while taking 
advantage of the sub- 
sidence of popular passion in connection with the subject. But he went 
to the utmost limits of safety, if he did not actually transgress them ; and 
in Scotland as in England those bounds were passed by his son. 

According to the last phase before the Union of the Crowns, it was 
exceedingly doubtful whether a General Assembly could legally be con- 
vened without the authority of the Crown. In 1604 and 1605 James 
refused to call one, and in the latter year a number of ministers met at 
Aberdeen, claiming to be the legal General Assembly. Several of those 
who had attended were punished, but the amount of sympathy they re- 
ceived made James hesitate to adopt extreme measures. He tried unsuc- 
cessfully to convert some of the leaders to his own views by bringing them 
up to London to consort with the English bishops, but he gained little by 
this beyond keeping Andrew Melville permanently out of the country. Then 
the king summoned an informal convention of ministers and laymen, to whom 
he propounded a scheme for providing each presbytery with a permanent 
" moderator " or president. From this he advanced to making the moder- 
ators of the Provincial Synods also permanent, each bishop being moderator 




Plan and view of Edinburgh in the early 17th century. 
[From a contemporary print.] 



RIGHT DIVINE 417 

of his own presbytery and his own synod, and an ex officio representative in 
the General Assembly. The permanent moderators in general provided 
an obvious step towards the development of episcopal government ; while 
Church lands appropriated by the Crown were restored to the Church in 
order to make provision for an enlarged episcopate. Popular irritation 
was soothed by the professed application of the funds to the enforcement 
of the penal laws against Romanism. But the practical outcome was that 
when a regular Assembly was held in 1610 it was dominated by the Crown, 
admitted that no Assembly could be held without the Royal authority, and 
assented to the extension of the episcopate and of an episcopal authority 
of a more comprehensive and penetrating character than had been granted 
when bishops were first introduced. An important detail was added when 
three of the bishops w T ere regularly ordained by bishops in England, thus 
reviving the apostolic succession which, in the Anglican view, constituted 
the difference between an unrecognised sect and a branch of the Catholic 
Church. These proceedings were ratified with some further modifications 
by a parliament in 16 12. As yet, however, no changes were made in the 
accustomed ritual and liturgy of the Church, which still in general retained 
its Presbyterian organisation. 

The next move was made in a General Assembly in 16 16. Proposals 
were made, after some order had been taken for the further repression of 
Popery, to introduce a revised liturgy, confession of faith, and catechism. 
It must be remembered that at this time the Presbyterians had not de- 
veloped their later objection to a stereotyped form of service. The pro- 
posals were carried, and James then resolved to introduce further alterations 
after the Anglican model. He had avoided the mistake, in Scotland as in 
England, of appointing bishops of the High Anglican School. Hence it 
was with extreme reluctance, and against their own judgment, that they 
endorsed the innovations embodied in the Five Articles of Perth, which were 
adopted by the General Assembly held in that city in 1618. These Articles 
required the observation of certain Church Festivals, and admitted the 
private administration of the Sacrament under special circumstances. But 
the Article which seriously alarmed the Calvinistic conscience was that 
which required kneeling at Communion, since this was regarded as imply- 
ing the act of Adoration. The practice had been retained in England 
through the firm resistance offered by Cranmer and Ridley to the pressure 
of Knox and Hooper when the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was 
authorised. Alarm and resentment were now aroused ; and it was not 
without difficulty that the ratification of parliament was obtained three 
years later, while popular sentiment encouraged the clergy to ignore the 
new regulations. 

James, then, had carried matters at least as far as it was safe to venture. 
But when Charles I. ascended the throne he was guided in Scotland as in 
England by considerations which left popular feeling out of account. It 
was enough for him to believe that he was acting within his rights ; whether 

2 D 



4 i 8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in so doing and enforcing his own will he was serving the people's interests, 
it was for him and not for them to judge. His own religious convictions 
were deep and sincere, and he had no qualms about compelling his people, 
whether in England or in Scotland, to conform to them. Moreover, he 
had the singularly unfortunate habit of forgetting that, if he wished to 
enforce unpopular measures, it was at least advisable to seek means of 
conciliation instead of accumulating causes of irritation ; that if he was 
bent on alienating one section of the community, it would be politic to 
secure support in other quarters. 

The religious innovations under James VI. had been possible because 
the old king had kept on good terms with the magnates. The one thing 
wanting to combine the whole country in a solid opposition to the Royal 
policy was a quarrel between the magnates and the Crown. A means of 
irritating the magnates lay ready to the king's hand ; having discovered his 
opportunity, he did not neglect to seize it. Since the party of the Reforma- 
tion had triumphed in Scotland, quantities of Church lands had been 
granted away ; every great landowner and many of the small ones had 
profited thereby. Charles was no sooner on the throne than he issued an 
Act of Revocation, resuming for the Crown all grants of land made since 
the death of James V. in 1542. The Revocations were not intended to be 
pure confiscations ; the holders were to receive compensation assessed by 
a commission. But as a matter of course the assessment was more than 
sufficiently adverse to the holders to create in them a rankling sense of 
injustice. It was part of Charles's scheme to appropriate a portion of the 
revenues accruing to make provision for the clergy. What are called in 
England "tithes" and in Scotland "teinds" had in the course of the 
Reformation passed into the hands of miscellaneous laymen who had no 
other connection with the lands. When the arrangements for the Revoca- 
tion were completed, a process which occupied some five years, the land- 
owners were enabled to recover the teinds at a low price, a portion only 
being appropriated to the ministerial stipends. The clergy benefited and 
the Crown benefited ; but the *' Titulars of Teind," as the holders had been 
called, got only about two years' purchase by way of compensation, and 
the landowners got only ten years' purchase. Thus both these bodies 
were driven into an attitude of angry hostility to the Crown, while, in the 
eyes of the clergy, the financial benefits they received were by no means 
an equivalent for the increased control of the Crown over the Church. 
And now when the clergy kicked against the pricks, the sympathies of every 
nobleman and every laird or landowner were on their side instead of on 
the king's. And as in the case of ship-money in England, human nature 
ignored the honest intention behind the arbitrary act, and assumed that 
the whole thing had been done in order to increase the power of the 
Crown. 

Having thus combined a united opposition where his father had been 
careful to preserve for himself powerful sectional support, Charles pro- 



RIGHT DIVINE 419 

ceeded with that ecclesiastical reconstruction which James had carried as 
far as he dared, thereby also attracting the sympathies of Puritan England, 
already sufficiently alarmed and irritated, to the cause of the Scottish 
Presbyterians. Scottish Presbyterianism too had already felt its sympathies 
aroused for the English parliament, both on account of its Puritanism, and 
because of the alarm generated by the Catholic successes on the Continent 
and the failures of Buckingham's administration. 

In 1633, the year in which Wentworth was to go to Ireland and Laud 
was to become Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles visited his northern 
kingdom in company with Laud. He had already entered on the dangerous 
course of appointing Laudian bishops. The ritual of the services attended 
by the King of Scotland was alarming to Scottish Protestantism. The 
parliament summoned at Edinburgh was hardly permitted to express its 
antagonism to the bills laid before it by the Lords of the Articles, who in 
the nature of things were practically all king's men ; moreover, it was placed 
in a difficulty by being required to reject or to pass the whole series en bloc. 

Even under these conditions the bills were passed with difficulty, though 
Charles may have been unaware of the intensity of the antagonism which 
they aroused. In the main, they were confirmations of the Acts of the last 
reign and of the Act of Revocation. Soon after Charles left Scotland a 
widely-signed protest was drawn up by Lord Balmerino ; whereupon he 
was prosecuted for treason, though the only punishment inflicted was a 
short imprisonment. For the first time since the Reformation a bishop was 
appointed to the Chancellorship — a fresh grievance to the nobles, and a 
fresh ground oi hostility towards the bishops at large. 

In 1636 a Book of Canons, or Ecclesiastical Regulations, was issued, 
with no warrant save that of the royal authority, in which the Presbyterian 
constitution of the Church was ignored ; and in the following year was issued 
a new Service Book, which differed from that used in England only in some 
details which rendered it more anti-Calvinistic. It was assumed that Laud 
was responsible ; erroneously, as it happened, because the most objection- 
able details had been introduced against his judgment at the instance of 
certain Scottish bishops, who were more Laudian than Laud himself. 

A mere perusal of the new Service Book was all that was needed to drive 
the still existing moderate party into full opposition. On the first attempt 
to read the new service in St. Giles's in Edinburgh, an unseemly riot broke 
out; tradition affirms that it was opened by a woman named Jenny Geddes, 
who flung her stool at the head of the officiating Dean. Popular feeling 
was overwhelmingly on the side of the rioters, whom the magistrates 
did not dare to punish. All over the country, it became manifest that half 
the ministers would refuse on their own account to use the Service Book 
in spite of the Royal injunction, and the other half would not be allowed to 
use it by their congregations. 

Petitions poured in against the innovations. A vast gathering of pro- 
testors was resolved into a group of elected committees knowm as the 



420 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

" Tables," who acted practically as if they had been a legally assembled parlia- 
ment of the nation. The Tables formulated the National League and Cove- 
nant for the defence of religion, and in March 1638 the whole Scottish nation 
was signing it. The document was based upon a Covenant of 158 1 " against 
popery," which had been signed by King James himself ; but it was accom- 
panied by explanatory clauses explicitly condemning recent innovations. 
It was expressly and even fervently loyal to the Crown, but it was an 
emphatic refusal on the part of the whole nation to have forced upon it a 
form of religion which it regarded as intolerable, though it did not actually 
denounce Episcopacy. 

Faced with such a unanimous resistance the king sent the Marquis of 
Hamilton to negotiate, with full powers, while Puritan England looked on 
and sympathised with the Scots. The Scots insisted on a free parliament, 
a free General Assembly, and the revocation of the new Service Book and 
the Book of Canons ; and they would not listen to the king's demand that 
the National Covenant should itself be withdrawn. Charles was obliged to 
give way. At the end of the year a General Assembly met ; the bishops 
refused to recognise its authority over them. The Assembly insisted ; 
when Hamilton dissolved it, it paid no attention, but continued to act on 
its own responsibility, deposed the bishops, and abolished the Episcopate. 



VIII 

THE BISHOPS' WARS 

It was not possible to pretend that the action of the General Assembly 
was legal. In plain terms, a crisis had arrived in which the will of the king 
and the will of the nation were in flat opposition, and the constitution 
provided the nation with no legal means of resisting the Crown. The 
General Assembly, in fact, constituted itself the governing body of the 
nation, and it did so with the approval of probably at least nine-tenths of 
the population. The Scots were well aware that they might be compelled 
to resort to maintaining the popular liberties in arms, and they had been 
making preparations for that possibility. They had been collecting sub- 
scriptions which were virtually compulsory though nominally voluntary. 
They now chose officers ; troops were being drilled on all hands, and there 
were in the country experienced veterans who had fought under Gustavus 
Adolphus — soldiers who understood discipline, and captains competent to 
hold high command, of whom the chief was Alexander Leslie. 

Charles, on his side, appeared to have no other alternatives before him 
than complete surrender or successful coercion, since the Royal authority 
had been practically defied. But he could not coerce Scotland with 
Scottish troops, for, apart from the remoter highlands and islands, the 
immense majority of the fighting men were on the side of the Covenant. 



RIGHT DIVINE 421 

To coerce Scotland he must have an English army. He could rely on the 
loyalty of the Marquis of Huntly in the north, and of the city of Aberdeen ; 
elsewhere he could hope for very little support. In the spring of 1639 
Montrose,for the Covenant, captured Aberdeen, and Leslie secured Edinburgh 
Castle. As General-in-Chief of the self-constituted government, Leslie, then, 
with a considerable force, proceeded to Dunselaw, in the neighbourhood of 
Berwick. Charles had succeeded in collecting some levies in England, and 
faced the covenanting force ; but his troops were untrained, his officers 
without experience, and the men were at the best half-hearted and quite 
unfitted to do battle with Leslie. The Scots had no desire for war, and 
Charles came to terms, which merely postponed the conflict, which is known 
as the Bishops' war. Under the terms of the treaty, both sides were to 
disband their forces, and a free Assembly and Parliament were promised. 
Assembly and Parliament met in August only to confirm the proceedings 
of the previous Assembly, and to order a universal signing of the Covenant. 

For ten years, as we have seen, it had been possible to carry on the 
king's government in England without an appeal to parliament for further 
funds. But without further funds the organisation of an army com- 
petent to coerce Scotland was not possible. Wentworth, now raised to 
the earldom of Strafford, advised the step of calling a parliament. The 
voice of opposition had been so long silenced that the Deputy, long absent 
in Ireland, may well have imagined that a new parliament might be 
coerced or cajoled into satisfying the king's demand. If so he was 
mistaken. The assembly known as the Short Parliament met in April 
1640, only to ^demand that grievances should be dealt with before supply. 
Strafford's Deputyship had carried him out of touch alike with England 
and Scotland ; and it is evident that he completely misjudged the temper 
of both peoples. His recommendations for a northern campaign had 
been based on the assumption that the Scottish resistance was merely 
superficial ; and even now he seems to have been under the illusion that 
in this emergency the English people would rally to the Crown. 

But the Short Parliament would not grant the king the twelve sub- 
sidies for which he asked, even though he had offered to withdraw the claim 
to ship-money as the price. The king, certainly not by Strafford's advice, 
was unwise enough to reject the proposal put forward by the moderate 
party in the House of ( Commons, that the sense of the House should be 
taken on the question of granting a supply without committing them to 
any specific amount. It was tolerably certain that parliament would not 
grant all that he asked ; and, choosing to have either all or nothing, he 
dissolved the parliament when it had been sitting for only three weeks. 

A considerable war-fund was raised by contributions which were 
strictly voluntary. Again Charles marched to the North, where he was 
joined by Strafford, who had in the meanwhile been back in Ireland 
arranging for the organisation of a force. But before his arrival the 
Scots had already crossed into England, easily routing the English at 



422 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Newburn ; for the king's army was no better than it had been in the 
previous year. The Scots came, declaring themselves to be in no way 
hostile to the English. To fight under the existing conditions would have 
been mere folly. Again the king entered on negotiations, and withdrew 
to the South ; leaving Northumberland and Durham in the hands of 
the Scots as security for the payment of their expenses. It was clear 
that without vigorous support from England the king would be com- 
pelled to concede to the subjects of his northern kingdom whatever they 
might demand. Without aid from an English parliament Charles was 
paralysed ; and in the desperate hope that such aid might after all be forth- 
coming, the assembly known as the Long Parliament was summoned in 
November. 



CHAPTER XVI 
THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 

I 

THE LONG PARLIAMENT 

AMONG the supporters of the king there was a single commanding figure 
which utterly dwarfed all others, one man whom the Commons of England 
had learnt to regard as their deadly enemy, one man whom they hated 
because he was the man whom they feared — the apostate Strafford. Laud 
might be the object of popular detestation but no one was afraid of him, or 
of the crowd of intriguing courtiers who were much less likely to devise 
a working scheme of absolutism than to wreck by short-sighted jealousies 
the daring designs of the one master mind. While Strafford stood by the 
king, the Commons could devise no stroke without the fear that it might be 
defeated, and even turned against them, by the keen brain and the in- 
domitable will of the great minister. Before anything else could be 
accomplished s Strafford must go. Among the moderate men there were 
at least not a few who believed or hoped that if Strafford were removed 
the king and the nation might be reconciled. Charles, with no Buckingham 
and no Wentworth to dominate him, might submit to be guided by the 
moderates, and all would be comparatively well. But while Strafford 
remained nothing could be done. The Scots were in possession of the 
north of England, but the parliament and the English nation had nothing 
to fear from the Scots. The Houses had hardly been assembled when the 
Commons resolved on the impeachment of Strafford. 

The earl, now fully alive to the temper of the people and the parliament, 
conscious that his enemies would leave no stone unturned in their efforts 
for his destruction, knew that both his own safety and the safety of the king 
would best be served, if only the king could be trusted, by his own with- 
drawal to Ireland ; but the king dared not stand alone. Strafford remained 
to abide the storm. The Commons, led by Pym, impeached him of treason 
at the Bar of the House of Lords ; he was arrested and confined in the 
Tower. Within six weeks Laud too was arrested on the charge of treason ; 
others of the king's most prominent agents had fled the country in fear of 
a like fate. 

Strafford had been some four months in prison before the preparations 
for the trial were complete. But when the case for the prosecution was un- 

4 2 3 



424 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

folded, it became more and more evident that the charge of treason must 
break down in law. Strafford had striven to subvert the constitution, as 
interpreted by the parliamentary lawyers ; but seeking to make the Crown 
absolute could by no means be translated into treason in the technical 
sense. The Lords were sitting as the supreme legal court in the country, 
and were bound to give judgment according to law. The Commons' 
managers of the trial saw that they would be defeated. The most effective 
piece of evidence was contained in papers, in which, referring to the Scots 
war, Strafford had said : " You have an army in Ireland that you may employ 
to reduce this kingdom to obedience, for I am confident the Scots cannot 
hold out three months." But, however popular feeling might be inflamed 
by the charge that Strafford had meant to use the army in Ireland to coerce 
England, it was, in the first place, impossible to prove that England, not 
Scotland, was the country to be coerced, in which case the English Parlia- 
ment had nothing to say in the matter ; and, in the second place, it was 
more than doubtful whether the term treason could be stretched to cover 
words inciting the king to coerce his subjects. 

The Commons then resolved on a step which set the struggle on a new 
footing. Hitherto they had taken their stand on the law ; at all points they 
had claimed that they were asserting the legal rights of the House of 
Commons against prerogatives claimed by the Crown which had no place 
in the constitution. Now they found that the law was against them ; 
not merely the law as interpreted by judges whose authority was deprived 
of weight by their personal dependence on the king, but the law as it must 
be interpreted by the House of Peers itself. They resolved to drop the 
impeachment and to proceed by bill of attainder. The argument that the 
attempted subversion of the constitution was treason against the State, and 
was therefore treason against the person of the king, would not hold in 
law ; it followed that there was no law by which treason against the State, 
as distinct from treason against the king's person, could be punished. 
Punishment, therefore, could only be inflicted by a process overriding the 
law, and this could only be effected by a special Act of parliament dealing 
with the emergency ; not a resolution of one House or of both Houses, 
but an Act by the king in parliament, the ultimate sovereign authority 
which alone can override all law. A bill of attainder condemning Strafford 
to die as a public enemy was introduced and carried in the House of 
Commons. It was carried in the House of Lords. The king had given 
Strafford the most solemn pledges that if he remained in England he should 
be protected by the Crown. Without the king's assent the Act was waste 
paper. Would the king veto it ? Would he face the storm of popular 
resentment which was already beginning to clamour against the queen as 
well as the minister ? Queen and courtiers hated the great man who was 
no courtier ; they were blind to their own incapacity, to their own need of 
Strafford. Every influence was brought to bear upon Charles to persuade 
him to surrender. He yielded, and by the great betrayal sealed his own doom. 




THE TRUE MANNER OF THE SITTING OF THE LORDS AND COMMONS OF PARLIAMENT 
UPON THE TRYAL OF THOMAS, EARLE OF STRAFFORD, 1 64 1 " 




; THE TRUE MANNER OF THE EXECUTION OF THOMAS, EARLE OF STRAFFORD, 
UPON TOWER HILL, THE I2TH OF MAY, 164I " 

From etchings by Hollar, 1641. 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 425 

Strafford's head had hardly fallen when the Commons set about reaping 
the fruits of their victory. In three months every instrument of absolutism 
on which the king had sought to rely throughout his reign was abolished. 
While Strafford was still in the Tower, government without parliament 
had been abolished by an Act requiring that parliament should assemble 
at least once in every three years, with or without the royal summons. 
An Act was now passed which forbade the dissolution of the existing 
parliament without its own consent. The right to ship-money, tonnage 
and poundage, and customs duties was formally abrogated. The arbitrary 
courts of Star Chamber, of High Commission, and of the Council of the 
North were abolished, so that no offenders could be tried except by the 
ordinary courts under the ordinary law. 

So far Lords and Commons had acted together. Save in the matter 
of the attainder of Strafford, the whole series of Acts only abolished claims 
of the Crown which had never been admitted by the Commons, or removed 
glaring abuses. But now the Commons began to assert powers which 
they had never pretended to claim before King Charles ascended the 
throne. They attacked the bishops, in a bill which demanded their 
removal from the House of Lords and from the Privy Council ; and this 
brought them into collision with the House of Lords, which rejected the 
bill. The advanced Puritan party in the Commons responded with a bill 
aiming not at a compromise but at the abolition of Episcopacy, known as 
the Root and Branch bill. For the first time the Commons themselves 
were divided, while the majority in the Lords was in direct opposition to 
the majority m the Commons. 

But the contest was deferred. The Scots army had now been duly 
paid off, and Charles paid a visit to the Northern kingdom, where Montrose 
and others had now broken away from the Covenanting chiefs, headed by 
Argyle, whose domination was hotly resented in many quarters. The 
king, however, found the party of revolt so weak that he was obliged to 
place himself in Argyle's hands, and Argyle himself was strengthened by 
the discovery of a plot against his person, in which both the king and 
Montrose were implicated, though without justification, by popular rumour. 
And while the movement of affairs in Scotland was disturbing, events of 
a still more serious character were taking place in Ireland. 

Wentworth had ruled Ireland with a strong hand. Disorder had been 
crushed and prosperity had begun to make its way. But the order and 
the prosperity both depended upon the unscrupulous vigour and ability of 
a fearless Deputy. When Wentworth vanished behind the portals of the 
Tower, there was no one to take his place in Ireland, and no one to 
curb the hostilities of the settlers and the native Irish, of Catholics and 
Protestants, of family rivalries. While Strafford lived, there was always 
" the chance that he would return, and the certainty that if he did it would 
be in an evil day for any one who had tried to make trouble during his 
absence. But the restraining hand was gone, and in the autumn there 



426 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

came a sudden savage outburst of the Irishry against the Englishry. 
Ghastly tales of brutal barbarity and of blood-thirsty massacres flew over 
England. The truth was hideous enough, and became fivefold more 
hideous in the telling. England raged for vengeance, but — where was 
the avenger ? If an army were despatched to Ireland under the king's 
officers, what would that army do ? Suspicions grim and foul were in 
men's minds. The rising was the work of Jesuits, of Papists ; perhaps the 
king's French wife was at the bottom of it ; it was a plot to provide the 
king with an army for destroying the liberties of England. For such wild 
suspicions there was no sort of justification ; but the plain fact stood out, 

that if an army were 
placed under the 
king'? control the 
work which the 
parliament had just 
accomplished would 
almost inevitably be 
undone. 

Almost at the 
moment when the 
news arrived from 
Ireland, the parlia- 
ment which had been 
adjourned in August 
reassembled. The 
only constitutional 
action possible was 
to vote supplies for 
an Irish war, the control of which would be in the king's hands ; which 
was precisely the thing which the parliament, or at least the Puritans, dared 
not do. The alternative was to show cause why the king should not be 
trusted with a control which was his by constitutional right. 

So the Opposition leaders drew up the Grand Remonstrance, a detailed 
indictment enumerating all the arbitrary proceedings, all the misgovernment, 
with which the king had been charged. It was a statement of the case for 
parliament against the Crown. The Grand Remonstrance completed the 
work of dividing the Commons, which had begun with the Puritan attack 
on the constitution of the Church. It amounted to a virtual, though not a 
formal, demand for the abdication of the king's sovereignty. It rallied to 
the support of the Crown all those who, while they had been ready to 
insist on limiting the royal prerogative, dreaded the unchecked tyranny 
of an irresponsible House of Commons more than the tyranny of the 
king. Hour after hour the stormy debate raged ; not till after midnight 
was the division taken and the Remonstrance carried by eleven votes. 
Then a motion was brought forward that the Remonstrance itself should 




A newspaper heading of 1641, 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 427 

be printed and published ; the storm broke out with redoubled fury when 
the minority proclaimed their intention to protest, a course for which 
there was no precedent. Swords were drawn ; it seemed that blood would 
be shed on the floor of the House itself, when John Hampden succeeded in 
procuring the adjournment of the debate. 

At the moment, the king was on his way back from Scotland. On his 
arrival in London he found that there had rallied to his support not only 
something like half the House of Commons but a great force of popular 
feeling in the city. The violence of the 
Opposition had so far overreached itself 
that a very little tact and skill would have 
sufficed at this period to turn the scale 
decisively in favour of the Crown. But 
the tact and the skill were both wanting. 
The king adopted a course which stiffened 
the Opposition and dashed the hopes of 
his own supporters. Perhaps he thought 
that the victory was already won ; at any 
rate he proceeded not to conciliate, but to 
strike. One of the Lords and five of the 
leaders of the Opposition in the Commons 
were found to have held communication 
with the Scots, which was, undoubtedly, 
in the technical sense, treasonable. Charles 
laid an impeachment of the Members 
before the House of Lords, and on the 
following day came down to the House of 
Commons in person, attended by a troop 
of armed men, to arrest them. 

News of his coming had already reached 
the House, and the five members had been 
sent off by water to the City where it was 
known that they would be secure. Charles entered, leaving his followers 
outside the still open doors, and advanced to the Speaker's chair amid cries 
of " Privilege" from every hand. Announcing that he had come to take the 
" traitors," he asked Lenthall, the Speaker, if they were present. Lenthall, 
kneeling, replied that he had neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as 
the House should direct him. Himself scanning the benches, and seeing 
that, in his own words, " The birds had flown," he withdrew, with a warning 
that if the House did not send them to him he must take his own course. 
All that he had gained by the proceedings over the Grand Remonstrance 
was lost, at least outside the House. London was united in solid support 
' of the outraged Commons, who for safety held their sittings in the City 
instead of at Westminster. A week later the king left Whitehall, not to enter 
it again till the country had passed through the storms of civil war. 




The Church Militant : a Bishop of 1642. 
From a contemporary caricature.] 



428 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The next eight months were spent by both sides in preparations for an 
armed conflict, diversified by negotiations, futile because neither believed in 
the sincerity of the other. The moderates gradually left London to join 
the king ; among the number were reckoned three-fourths of the House of 
Lords and about one-third of the House of Commons. The Houses, which 
continued to sit at Westminster, consisted entirely of the representatives of 
one side, although they were still technically the National Parliament. But 
virtually all real chance of peace had been ended when the king attempted 
to arrest the five members. Both sides were raising troops, appointing 
officers, and collecting money. The king sent his queen to get financial 
aid from her brother in France, and from Holland, where the young 
Stadtholder, William of Orange, had married, a year since, the English 
Princess Mary. Charles's nephews, Rupert and Maurice, the younger sons 
of the late Elector Palatine, left what was practically a lost cause abroad 
to take up the king's cause in England. Hull closed its gates to the king's 
followers ; and the last semblance of peace vanished when the king un- 
furled his standard at Nottingham in August (1642). 



II 

THE FIRST STAGE OF THE CIVIL WAR 

One immense advantage the parliament possessed ; it had the fleet on 
its side, and held control of almost every port in the country. It controlled 
also the machinery for taxation, whereas the king was obliged to rely for 
financial support chiefly on voluntary contributions. The struggle at the 
outset was an English struggle ; Scotland stood aside, and Ireland was too 
deeply plunged in its own embroilments to take a hand in the conflict on the 
east of St. George's Channel. In England, roughly speaking, the northern 
and western counties favoured the royalist cause, the midlands were 
divided, and the eastern counties from the Humber to the Isle of Wight 
favoured the parliament, while Devon and Cornwall at first hung in the 
balance. But the towns tended to favour the parliament, and all over 
the country Puritan gentry were to be found in the Royalist counties, and 
Royalist gentry in the Parliamentarian counties. Precisely as the Reforma- 
tion had taken hold readily in the eastern portion of England, while the north 
and the west clung to their traditional beliefs, Puritanism was accepted in the 
east, while the Conservatism of the north and west kept them, in the main, 
on the side of the Church and the Crown. As in the past, so now, London, 
Kent, and the Eastern Counties, were the districts most zealous in asserting 
popular rights. And now, as before, the seamen in the ports of the west as 
well as of the east were on the Puritan and popular side. 

Only to a very limited extent was the war one of classes. It was no up- 
rising of an oppressed population against the domination of an aristocracy. 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 429 

There was, indeed, a preponderance of the aristocracy, of the landed gentry, 
on one side, and of the burgess element on the other; but on both sides 
both were represented, and for two years the chief parliamentary com- 
manders were the Earls of Essex and Manchester. The whole of the great 
English civil war was further characterised by an honourable absence of 
the ferocity for which the Thirty Years' War, still raging on the Continent, 
was distinguished. Both sides were fighting for principles which it was not 
inherently impossible to harmonise ; on both sides the majority sought 
only the predominance of its own principles, not the complete destruction 
of its opponents. And in consequence the havoc wrought and the brutali- 
ties committed were extraordinarily small in comparison with those of 
other wars of equal magnitude. Even the damage wrought in churches 
and cathedrals by iconoclastic Puritantism was slight in comparison with 
what had been done under shelter of law, when there was no war at all, in 
the reigns of Henry VII I. and Edward VI. 

The war in its initial stages was a war of military amateurs. There 
were few living Englishmen in 1642 who had ever seen a pitched battle or 
witnessed a scientifically conducted campaign under capable commanders. 
For its rank and file, one side had to rely mainly on city train-bands or on a 
very raw militia, while the other drew its recruits largely from the establish- 
ments of great landowners. The Royalists, or Cavaliers, were very much 
better furnished with horse, while the strength of the Parliamentarians, or 
Roundheads, lay in the stubborn valour of their foot-soldiers. The distin- 
guishing feature lay in the great preponderance among the Cavaliers of the 
class correspbnding to the public-school-boys of to-day. " Their troops," 
said Cromwell, " are gentlemen's sons, younger sons and persons of quality, 
gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them. You 
must get men of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, 
or else you will be beaten still." With all the grit and courage which the 
Roundhead troops displayed in the first stages of the war, a grit and 
courage which frequently saved them from disastrous defeat, their training 
had not given them the audacity which was necessary to the winning of 
victories. The problem for the Roundhead leaders was to find that inspira- 
tion which would make their men fight to win instead of fighting to hold 
their own. 

Hence for the first year of the war the parliamentary troops were 
habitually on the defensive ; and the Royalists were the attacking party. 
But at the moment when the king's standard was raised at Nottingham, 
neither party was ready to strike. Essex, the Roundhead General-in-Chief, 
was collecting his forces at Northampton to block the way of a Royalist 
march on London. The king shifted to Shrewsbury, a better centre for 
collecting his main army ; Essex moved to Worcester. When the king 
began his advance, Essex again moved to intercept him, and the armies 
met at Edgehill. The charge of the Royalist cavalry on the wings swept 
their opponents off the field, with the Cavalier horse in pursuit. But 



430 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the Roundhead foot in the centre held their ground, two regiments of 
horse which had not been swept away charged upon the Royalist flank, 
and Rupert reappeared on the field, which he supposed to have been 
already won, in time only to prevent a rout. 

Still, the fruits of victory lay with the Royalists, who were able to 
continue their march to Oxford and establish headquarters there ; Essex, 
however, was able to fall back and block the way between Oxford and 
London. The Royalists, though they carried Brentford, did not venture 
to attack his position at Turnham Green, and fell back upon Oxford, 
whence during the spring and summer of 1643 Rupert conducted cavalry 
raids ; but no action of importance was fought. The parliamentary 

cause, however, suffered a serious loss by 
the death of John Hampden in a skirmish 
at Chalgrove Field. During these months, 
the Royalist Association of the Northern 
Counties, organised by Newcastle, brought 
the North almost entirely under Royalist 
control, though the Parliamentarians under 
the Fairfaxes held possession of Hull. In 
the south-west, which at the outset hung in 
the balance, the first successes of the parlia- 
mentary general, Waller, were counteracted 
by those of the Royalist Hopton. In July 
Reverse of three-pound piece of the defeat of Waller at Roundway Down, 

Charles I. struck at Oxford, 1643. - _ . , - . 

and the surrender of Bristol, secured almost 
the whole of the West country for the Royalists. 

The parliament still sat at Westminster, and the successes of the royal 
arms almost induced the Houses to accept terms of peace which would 
have been a virtual surrender. But now there was a check. Rupert 
would have appeared to have designed a great converging movement upon 
London, the king advancing with his main army from Oxford, Hopton 
moving along the south, and Newcastle descending from the North through 
the Eastern Counties. But Newcastle and Hopton were not prepared respec- 
tively to leave Hull and Plymouth on their rear. Charles resolved 
to secure the West by the capture of Gloucester ; and, by attacking it, 
drew Essex to advance to its relief. The relieving movement was itself 
successful. Charles, however, intercepted Essex on his withdrawal at 
Newbury. A decisive victory might have brought the war to an end 
at once, but Essex succeeded in cutting his way through, and the oppor- 
tunity was lost. 

Meanwhile Pym, the head of the administration at Westminster, had 
been at work on the design of drawing the Scots into active alliance with 
the English Parliament. Religion alone was the ground on which the 
Scots were prepared to intervene in England, and for them religion meant 
the establishment of Presbyterianism in the southern country. The parlia- 





THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 431 

ment men adhered in general to the common view that uniformity of 
religion was to be enforced ; they were committed to the demand for 
the abolition of Episcopacy, and Presbyterianism was the apparent alterna- 
tive. The result of the negotiations was the signing of the Solemn League 
and Covenant for the common establishment of religion, reformed " accord- 
ing to the Word of God and the example of the best reformed churches." 
The form of the Covenant is attributed to the diplomacy of Sir Harry 
Vane, who by this means made the pledge sufficiently elastic to admit of 
the now growing demand for a much wider toleration than was con- 
templated by either English or Scottish Presbyterianism. The scheme 
itself was in some sense a development born 
of an Anglo-Scottish assembly at Westminster, 
which drew up the famous Westminster Con- 
fession, a formula for British Puritanism 
which corresponds to the Lutheran Confession 
of Augsburg. It must be remarked, how- 
ever, that the English who were already in 
arms, and the Scots who were about to take 
arms, to coerce the Crown, both in the 
Covenant declared their loyalty to the king's 
person. The Solemn League and Covenant 
was the last achievement of John Pym, the 
greatest of the parliamentary chiefs ; he died 
before the year was out. Early in the new 
year a joint committee of both kingdoms was formed to control the 
management of the war. 

The man who discovered the inspiration of which the Roundhead 
armies stood in need was Colonel Oliver Cromwell, who had distinguished 
himself as a cavalry officer at Edgehill. Since that time he had not 
been prominent in the field, but had been preparing for great achievement 
by organising the Eastern Counties in such fashion as to render any 
Royalist movement there a sheer impossibility. Nominally as the sub- 
ordinate of the Earl of Manchester, he set himself to the task of raising 
regiments imbued with a spirit which would make them a match for Rupert's 
gentlemen, and with a discipline which would give them a decisive superi- 
ority. In officers and men the great desiderata, according to the civilians 
assembled at Westmirister, were respectability and orthodoxy. Cromwell 
wanted men who were full of enthusiasm for the Cause, and ready to 
submit to the severest discipline. For their orthodoxy he cared not a jot, 
though he required that they should be men of religion and of moral 
austerity. Given these conditions, military fitness was the sole quality 
he required in his subordinate officers. Out of such chosen material he 
constructed those picked regiments which under his leadership were to 
become the best troops in Europe. A first taste of their quality was given 
at Winceby. fight, when a Royalist force had passed the Humberand entered 



Coin portrait of Charles I. on three- 
pound piece of 1643. 




432 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the Eastern Counties before the end of 1643. That fight enabled him to 
relieve Hull, the one point in Yorkshire where the Fairfaxes, besieged by 
Newcastle, were still holding out. 

His time had not yet come, but early in the year (1644) the Scots, 
commanded by old Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, and his distant kins- 
man, David Leslie, had crossed the Border. With this new enemy, New- 
castle was no longer able to maintain his grip on the North. In April he 
was obliged to throw himself into York, where he was pressed by the Scots 
and by the Fairfaxes from Hull. In the south the defeat of Hopton at 
Cheriton removed immediate anxieties, and the army of the Eastern Counties 
Association under Manchester, with Cromwell as his cavalry chief, prepared 
to invade the North. Rupert, who had been detached from the king's main 
army to operate in Lancashire, made a successful dash to the relief of York, 
and raised the siege ; but when the Roundhead army began to retire, he 
advanced and offered battle at Marston Moor. The forces on either side 
were the largest assembled in any engagement in the course of the war ; 
Manchester's army of twenty-seven thousand men considerably outnumber- 
ing the Royalists. In the cavalry engagement on the wings, Cromwell's 
" Ironsides " routed Rupert's troopers, while Fairfax on the Roundhead 
right was routed by Goring. In the infantry engagement, the Roundheads 
on the left and the Royalists in the centre were victorious, so that the 
Scots on the right of the Roundheads were attacked on one flank by the 
victorious Royalist foot and on the other by those of the Royalist horse 
who had not ridden off in pursuit. The stubborn resistance, however, of 
the Scots, against overwhelming odds, enabled horse and foot from the 
Roundhead left to come to their rescue and cut the Royalists to pieces. 

Marston Moor shattered the Royalist force on the north, and it 
established Cromwell as the first cavalry leader of the day. He had routed 
the hitherto irresistible Rupert, and he had shown a quality which Rupert 
never possessed, that of maintaining a perfect control over his troops in the 
moment of victory. Rupert, as a rule, swept all before him, but his men 
were not held in check, and continued a furious pursuit or turned to 
pillaging. Cromwell's Ironsides drove their opponents in rout, halted, re- 
formed, and were again launched on the flank or rear of the adversary. 
Long ago the son of King Henry III. had been taught the great principle 
of cavalry fighting, to his cost, at Lewes, and never repeated the blunder 
which lost him that battle. Cromwell himself had applied the principle, as 
Rupert had ignored it, in the first pitched battle in the war at Edgehill ; 
but Rupert and the gallants of England never learnt the lesson, and the 
Cavaliers paid the penalty in full measure at Naseby fight, within a year of 
Marston Moor. 

If the Ironsides and the Scots had won the North of England, elsewhere 
matters were by no means going favourably for the parliament. Hopton's 
defeat by Waller at Cheriton gave the parliamentary generals an oppor- 
tunity for taking the offensive against the king, who fell back to Worcester. 






THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 433 

But Waller and Essex made the blunder of dividing their forces, the former 
remaining to deal with Charles, while the latter marched into Devon in hope 
of recovering the West country. Thus, a few days before Marston Moor, 
Charles was able to rout Waller at Cropredy Bridge, and marched south-west 
in pursuit of Essex. At Lostvvithiel, in Cornwall, the parliamentary General- 
in-Chief was surrounded by a superior force, and though he was able to cut 
his way through with his cavalry, and himself to escape by sea, the bulk of 
his force was compelled to capitulate. The Royalists were again undis- 
puted masters of the West. 

Cropredy Bridge and Lostwithiel together were not an equivalent for 
Marston Moor. The victorious army of the North was stronger than the 
victorious army of the South. Nevertheless, it was only under severe pressure 
that Manchester was induced to leave the Scots behind him, and march 
south to cut off the return of Charles. Manchester failed in his task, to the 
bitter indignation of his second in command. He intercepted Charles at 
Newbury, and ought to have crushed him, but, though victorious in the 
battle, he allowed the Royalist army to escape past him, and, by refusing 
to press on its heels, allowed the king to rally his scattered forces. The 
moment for crushing him was lost. 

Meanwhile events took a new turn in Scotland. The party of Argyle 
was completely predominant in the Lowlands, but the best troops and the 
best commanders were all engaged in England. Argyle himself, though 
an astute politician, was no soldier. The Highland clans had hitherto 
taken little part in the troubles which did not practically concern them, 
but to many^of them the clan Campbell and its chief were extremely 
obnoxious. Advantage was taken of the state of feeling in the Highlands 
by Montrose, whose loyalty had been rewarded by a marquisate. Joined 
by Alastair Macdonald of Islay, at the head of a half-Scottish force from 
Ireland, he raised the royal standard in the North, and routed the troops 
of the Scottish Government at Tippermuir, following up his first success 
by the capture of Aberdeen ; which was dealt with in a merciless fashion, 
strongly contrasted with Montrose's treatment of the same city when he 
had captured it for the cause of the Covenant five years before. 



Ill 

THE NEW MODEL 

As the autumn of 1644 was passing into winter the critical moment 
of the war, though not the critical engagement, was immediately at hand. 
Although the biggest battle of the war had been fought and won by the 
Roundheads, with decisive effect so far as the North was concerned, only 
one fact of importance favourable to the parliament had emerged ; they 
had found a cavalry leader who was more than a match for Rupert and 

2 E 



434 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

troopers who were more than a match for Rupert's gentlemen. But the 
second battle of Newbury had shown that under the existing system there 
was no prospect that the chiefs of the army would realise that it was 
their business to strike home and win. Again, Scots and English together 
had won the victory of Marston Moor, but it had not united them. The 
honours of the day had been divided between the Scottish pikemen and 
the Ironsides, and the Scots angrily resented the assumption of all the 
credit to Cromwell and his troopers. Nor was jealousy alone responsible 
for the rupture. The Solemn League and Covenant was interpreted by 
the Scots as a pledge that the English Parliament would establish the 
Presbyterian system on Scottish lines, to the exclusion of all sectaries, who 
were to them an abomination. But Cromwell had stepped into the front 
rank ; half his troopers were sectaries, and he himself notoriously cared 
nothing for Presbyterian orthodoxy. His men might be Anabaptists, 
Baptists, Independents, anything, provided that the "root of the matter" 
was in them and they knew how to fight. But the Scottish cause in 
England was the cause not of parliament but of Presbyterianism ; it was 
on that understanding that the Scots had crossed the Border. If Cromwell 
and the men of his kind won the victory for parliament, the Presbyterian 
ideal was not likely to be realised. Thus cordial co-operation between 
the Scots and Cromwell was not to be looked for. Moreover, as time 
passed on it began to be doubtful how long the Scots army would be 
ready to remain in England — whether it would not have to return across 
the Tweed to deal with Montrose, with whom Argyle was proving himself 
quite unable to cope. 

Cromwell was not the only man who saw that there could be no 
decisive success without reorganisation ; a reorganisation which meant the 
substitution of' a new type for the present army chiefs, and for the present 
rules of discipline — the Cromwellian type in both cases. As matters stood, 
the best that the parliament could hope for was to say to the king, " You 
cannot beat us ; let us come to terms " ; and under such conditions satis- 
factory terms were not to be expected. In Cromwell's view, parliament 
could be and must be placed in a position to dictate terms. Hitherto he 
had not been prominent as a debater, though the force of the man had 
made itself felt on the rare occasions when he intervened. But now it was 
in parliament itself that the immediate battle must be fought ; and Cromwell 
opened the campaign by a direct attack upon Manchester for neglecting 
his duty as a commander to crush the enemy when in his power. But it 
was the principle, not the man, which mattered; he had no vindictive 
feeling towards Manchester, and readily dropped the attack on him when 
the way was cleared for a more effective procedure. 

The parliament itself had degenerated since its first meeting in 1640. 
Of its abler and nobler members not a few had taken their stand on the 
king's side. Since the outbreak of the war, the greatest statesman among 
its members, John Pym, had died, and Hampden, the most honoured and 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 435 

respected of all, had fallen on Chalgrove Field. Others, like Waller and 
Cromwell, had been drawn away to active duty, and those who remained 
lost tone. There were politicians at Westminster, but few men of states- 
manship. The politicians, however, were capable of realising that the war 
was being conducted on wrong principles, that an efficient army under 
efficient commanders would give it a new aspect. Cromwell, the man of the 
moment, must have his way for the moment ; the 
turn of the politicians would come afterwards. 

The first step, then, was the Self-denying Ordi- 
nance, under which every member of parliament in 
either House resigned his own command. It is usually 
said that an exception was made in favour of Crom- 
well ; but technically, at least, this is inaccurate. The 
object of the Ordinance was the removal of incom- 
petent commanders, but it did not preclude the 
reappointment of any one who was conspicuously fit. 
Not to have reappointed the one man who was 
obviously not only fit but necessary would have been 
an absurdity, although in the circumstances it would 
no less obviously have been out of the question to 
place him in chief command. For that office Sir 
Thomas Fairfax was chosen, a man who enjoyed the 
confidence of every one with whom he had been 
associated, welcome not only to Cromwell himself, 
who had fought beside him at Marston Moor, but on all 
hands, on account both of his military ability and his 
personal character. To Cromwell was presently given 
the post of Lieutenant-General, or second in command, 
which included the command of the horse. Pro- 
motion was in the hands of the General-in-Chief, who 
could be trusted to bestow it where it was deserved, 
regardless of other considerations than military ability. 

The next step was to construct the New Model 
Army, a compact group of regiments entirely under the control of the 
Commander-in-Chief, regularly paid ; a standing army, in short, very 
different from the miscellaneous local levies controlled by miscellaneous 
local committees, irregularly paid and under no systematic discipline. The 
pick of the veterans were promptly enrolled in the new regiments, com- 
prising something over twenty thousand men, though the numbers were not 
made up without compulsory impressment. And the best of these troops, 
who soon set the tone for their comrades, were Independents or Sectaries 
of the type whom Cromwell had enlisted and promoted, regardless of 
, Presbyterian orthodoxy. 

While Fairfax and Cromwell were organising the New Model, it 
was becoming increasingly clear that they would not be able to count 




A cuirassier, 1645. 
[From Skelton's "Armour."] 



436 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

on sufficient support from the Scots. The Leslies were much more inclined 
to think of returning to Scotland than of carrying their operations further 
south. Montrose in the Highlands flashed — no historian can avoid using 
the word — from point to point, falling swiftly and suddenly upon the 
Covenanting troops, harrying Argyle's own territory, and dispersing armies 
far larger than his own. His victory at Inverlochy, early in the year, 
almost warranted his promise to the king that before the end of the 
summer he would have won Scotland, and would be ready to aid Charles 

against his rebels in England. Even when 
Argyle was displaced by more efficient com- 
manders, the swiftness of Montrose's movements 
enabled him to outmanoeuvre them. 

But in England the generals of the New 
Model were determined to strike decisively. 
They realised that it was their business, not to 
capture and garrison strong places, but to bring 
Charles's main army to a decisive engagement 
and shatter it irrevocably. No one had at- 
tempted to shatter it before ; Manchester, indeed, 
had deliberately avoided doing so. In June they 
started in pursuit, and came up with the Royalist 
army near Naseby, in Northamptonshire. The 
New Model did its work. On the Royalist 
right Rupert's charge swept away Ireton's 
cavalry. On the Roundhead right Cromwell 
and his Ironsides swept off the Royalist horse. 
In the centre, the infantry on both sides fought 
fiercely, and the fortunes of the day were in 
doubt until Cromwell crashed back upon the 
enemy's flank while Rupert's headlong horsemen 
[From a parliamentarian Roadside of i6 4 6.] were still far away. The victory was complete. 

The Royalist horse escaped with curiously 
little injury, and Charles himself was forced to fly ; but the Royalist foot 
were shattered beyond hope of recovery. The whole of the baggage and 
all the munitions of war fell into the hands of the victors. 

There was still an army in the south-west, under Goring's command, 
which Fairfax proceeded without delay to shatter at Langport. During 
the month which passed between these two battles, Montrose in Scotland 
had again defeated the best of the Covenanting commanders ; and about 
a month after Langport he won at Kilsythe a victory which seemed to 
have brought Scotland under his hand. David Leslie hurried to Scotland, 
but before he was across the Border the fleeting character of Montrose's 
success was manifested. The Highlanders, whose desperate charges routed 
their foes, understood hand-to-hand fighting but not campaigning. They 
scattered to their homes when Montrose descended to the Lowlands, 




The Cavalier as " England's Wolf.' 






THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 437 

and Leslie with four thousand men caught the great Marquis at Philiphaugh 
with a very much smaller force counted by hundreds. Of these, some 
half fought with desperate courage ; the rest hardly took part in the 
engagement. Montrose's men were cut to pieces ; some of them were 
massacred in cold blood ; even the women and children belonging to 
Montrose's Irish troops were slaughtered. Philiphaugh was an ugly 
revenge for the ugly deeds of which the Irishmen had been guilty. In 
Scotland as well as in England the last chance of the Royalist cause 
disappeared. 

There were no more pitched battles. Charles had persistently followed 
the false policy of keeping his followers dispersed in garrisons all over the 
Royalist districts, instead of concentrating them to strike effective blows. 
The reduction of these garrisons now became the main business of the 
Roundhead force. The great manor houses and halls which could bid 
defiance to the onslaught of casual troops were wholly unfitted to stand 
siege when siege ordnance was brought up against them. Resistance 
where resistance is obviously useless, and can mean nothing but a sheer 
waste of life, is not countenanced by the laws of war. Only here and 
there, as at Basing Hall, did garrisons maintain a stubborn defiance in the 
face of palpably inevitable destruction ; and except in such cases they were 
habitually permitted to surrender on honourable terms. The fierce spirit 
of hatred expressed in Macaulay's rousing ballad of Naseby had not yet 
come into play. The soldiers of the New Model were held under a stern 
discipline ; robbery and outrage were practically unheard of. 

But meanwhile the king, if he was unable to strike, was able to watch 
events. Victory in the field was out of the question, but the growing signs 
of dissension among his opponents gave him ample hope of victory by 
diplomacy. Within the year after Naseby, he placed himself in the hands 
of the Scots Army in England, as the most promising quarter from which 
to conduct his negotiations. 



IV 

DOWNFALL 

The government of the country was in the hands of the parliament at 
Westminster ; the army was the army of the parliament, and its officers 
were the parliament's officers. The politicians imagined that their turn 
had come ; but the army was by no means disposed to allow its victory to 
be thrown away or to be utilised for purposes of which it disapproved. 
And it was quite certain to disapprove of much which the parliament and 
the Scots desired. In order to secure victory in the field parliament had 
suspended its Presbyterian rigour. The ranks of the army were filled with 
Sectaries ; officers and men, including those who were themselves Presby- 



438 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

terians, had no more mind to surrender liberty of religion at the dictation 
of Presbyterians than at the dictation of bishops. But they were led by 
men whom they trusted completely, and neither Fairfax nor Cromwell was 
willing to resort to force until force was proved to be the only available 
argument. 

At the end of 1645, the year of Naseby, the narrow Presbyterian section 
in parliament lost something of its predominance. Several seats had 
become vacant, which were now filled up, and a large proportion of the 
new members were in sympathy with the broad ideas of toleration. The 
Presbyterians, however, still held a substantial majority, and some two 
months after Charles had joined the Scots they formulated their proposals. 
Parliament was to have complete control of the militia for twenty years, 
the king was to sign the Covenant, and Presbyterianism was to be estab- 
lished, while the Episcopal system and all kinds of sectaries were to be 
suppressed. Either the predecessor or the successor of Charles on the 
throne would have accepted those terms, trusting their own wits so to 
manipulate parties after the settlement that they should recover their own 
predominance. But Charles had neither the cunning of his father nor the 
keen political wit of his son. He had no more respect for the spirit of his 
pledges than either of them, no compunction whatever about tricking his 
opponents. But he had a conscience of his own, and the one thing that 
he would not do was to act against his religious convictions. Therefore he 
temporised, believing that all he required was to gain time — that the longer 
a settlement was delayed, the more certain it was that dissensions among 
the ranks of his opponents would enable him to make his own terms. 

In fact, by accepting the terms at the moment he would have united the 
Scots and the English Presbyterians in his support, but his shifts to procure 
delay failed in their purpose. The Scots realised that he had no intention 
of signing the Covenant, the one matter of importance to them. Even at the 
best they were not too well satisfied with the English Presbyterianism, 
which rejected the Scottish doctrine of spiritual independence and main- 
tained the subordination of the Church to the State. Having made up 
their minds that the object they themselves had in view was unattainable, 
they resolved to withdraw themselves from English affairs altogether. They 
signified to the English parliament that they held the king as a hostage, 
but would hand him over to the parliament when the moneys due to them 
for their expenses in the war were paid up ; for it had been agreed as a 
part of the bargain, when the Scots intervened, that they did so at the 
charges of their allies. The sums claimed were promptly paid over ; the 
Scots surrendered the king to the parliamentary commissioners and betook 
themselves across the Border. The king was placed at Holmby House in 
Northamptonshire. 

The departure of the Scots pressed forward the crisis between Parlia- 
ment and the Army. While the Army remained, it might interfere with 
the strong hand, if Parliament endeavoured to override its will. There 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 

, . r , -~ +1-.0 rtnvp.rnlliei 



439 




BWUmi Recame Roundhead after Marston Moor, 
gj Roundhead throughout the war. HH Became ko 

The unshaded portions remained Royalist throughout the war. 
Royalist and Roundhead in the Civil War. 

, s dang e r)b e g anto T ss ^^o^P^^^o^ 

to negotiate with the king. In May l( H7 h h uberty of worship 

S^tS:t i^M. to U g ooa te t bfee 



440 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

years only. But, meanwhile, it was known that Parliament was negotiating 
with the Scots for the establishment of Presbyterianism, and that the domi- 
nant party were propounding measures for rendering the Army powerless. 
The bulk of it was to be disbanded, mulcted of most of its arrears of pay. 
The remainder of it was to be recast under Presbyterian officers, excluding 
all members of Parliament, Cromwell of course among them. Of this Army 
a portion was to be despatched to Ireland, while the remainder would be 
merely an instrument in the hands of the Presbyterian government. The 
Army demanded guarantees for liberty of conscience and the payment of 
arrears before it would consent to disbandment. No such guarantees were 
forthcoming. 

The Army chiefs, who had for long had a difficult task in restraining the 
troops, saw that the time had come for taking the law into their own hands. 
A troop of horse was despatched under Cornet Joyce to Holmby House, 
whence the king was conducted to headquarters at Newmarket. Then the 
troops marched upon London, occupied the city, and demanded the ex- 
clusion from parliament of eleven obnoxious members. The Army was 
master of parliament and of the situation. 

But even now the chiefs were bent upon extreme moderation. It was 
not their business to undertake a constitutional settlement, or to set up a 
military government ; but it was their business to secure the thing on 
which their hearts were set, liberty of conscience. They drew up certain 
" heads of proposals " which if they had been accepted would have settled 
the religious question. The penal laws against Romanists were to remain 
in force ; but with this single exception, to which practically no one but the 
Romanists was disposed to object, there was to be complete toleration. Epis- 
copalians, Presbyterians, and Sectaries were to enjoy entire freedom 
of worship subject to no civil penalties or disabilities. 

Neither the king, who was now domiciled at Hampton Court, nor the 
Presbyterians were ready to adopt the proposals. The chiefs reluctantly 
withdrew them and contented themselves with endeavours to secure a 
tolerable compromise. But Charles could not free himself from his con- 
viction that by temporising and intriguing he would still succeed in 
effecting his own aims. He escaped from Hampton Court, but was 
stopped in the Isle of Wight and detained in Carisbrooke Castle, whence he 
continued to carry on open negotiations with Parliament and the Army, 
and at the same time other secret negotiations which were to prove his 
ruin. The Army was at odds with the Parliament ; it was at odds now 
even with itself, for there had grown up in it a fiery democratic element, 
the element which became known as the Levellers. These men were 
imbued with the republican spirit, a contempt for social rank, hatred for 
the privileges of birth. They wanted the abolition of all such privileges ; 
the destruction of the Monarchy and the Peerage. Every man, in their eyes, 
had a right to a. voice in the government of the country. Moreover, while 
they demanded toleration for Sectaries, most of them included Anglicanism 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 441 

in the general bann which nearly all Protestants extended to Romanists. 
Many of them were now denouncing Cromwell and Ireton, because those 
generals had hitherto set their faces against the republican doctrine and 
persistently advocated the toleration of Episcopacy. 




The trial of Charles I. 
[From a print in Nalson's report of the trial published in 1684.] 

If the Army broke itself up now, the king might come by his own ; if 
the Royalists rose again they would surely be victorious. So Charles 
intrigued and plotted, and told the Scots that if they helped him to his 
throne in England he would establish Presbyterianism and make war upon 
the Sectaries. Scotland swallowed the bait, though not without opposition 



442 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

from Argyle, who, despite his faults, was not without some qualities of 
statesmanship. In the spring of 1648 a Scots army, led by the Duke of 
Hamilton, crossed the Border, in arms for the King of England. Charles's 
intrigue bore fruit in a sudden blaze of Cavalier insurrections in Wales, in 
Cornwall and Devon, and in Kent and the south-east. 

But the effect on the Army was not what the king had anticipated. 
While its chiefs, at the risk of their own popularity and to the danger of 
their own power, had been straining every nerve to keep the passions of the 
soldiery in check, striving honestly and openly to arrive at a reasonable 
compromise which should be tolerable to every one ; while they had been 
abstaining from violence, and had appealed to a show of force only when 




The execution of Charles I. in Whitehall, January 30, 1649. 
[From a print of the year.] 



self-defence left them no alternative ; the king had been playing with them, 
plotting for the destruction of the liberties for which they had fought. 
Compromise, agreements which depended upon good faith, could no longer 
be considered. There was one thing to be done at once — to stamp out the 
flame of insurrection. And then the Army and its leaders would be at one. 
Fairfax took charge of the insurrection in the south-east, suppressed it 
in Kent, and held the main body of the insurgents shut up in Colchester. 
Cromwell flung himself into Wales. By the time that he had crushed 
resistance there the Scots army, badly led and badly organised, was stream- 
ing into Lancashire. Near Preston, Cromwell fell upon the flank of the 
long advancing column, cut it in two, and destroyed it in a running fight 
which lasted for three days. Colchester surrendered to Fairfax. The 
spirit which had led the conquerors in the first civil war to act always with 



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444 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

humanity, and as a rule mercifully and even generously, was killed. This 
was a war wantonly stirred up, when the sword had already been sheathed 
and the king who had incited it was pretending to seek reconciliation. 
The insurgents were treated as rebels, and large numbers of them were 
shipped off to servitude in the plantations of Barbadoes. 

The first step had been taken ; the insurrection had been stamped out. 
The victorious troops were returning, determined to dictate their own 
terms, when the news reached them that the king and the Presbyterian 
majority at Westminster had struck their own bargain. The Army would 
have no more bargains. On the 6th December Colonel Pride and a 
body of musketeers took up their stand at the door of the House of 
Commons, arrested fifty of the members, and excluded a hundred more. 
The remnant, the Rump, as they were called, then assumed the functions 
of parliament. On the 4th January they declared themselves the sole 
sovereign authority in the country, and pronounced that their enact- 
ments had the force of law whether the Crown and the Peers assented 
or no. 

But behind this there was a more terrible determination. While the 
king lived there could be no peace. Charles had wrought treason against 
the nation ; it was he who had deluged the land in blood, he who had 
foiled every attempt to establish a basis for a lasting peace. The king 
must die, not because a republic was better than a monarchy, not because 
the Crown was in itself an evil, but because Charles, personally, was an 
impossible king, and while he lived neither a republic nor another king were 
possible. As for the justification, let the Blood of the Saints testify ! If 
the king were amenable to no human law, should the servants of the Lord 
be therefore debarred from acting as the instruments of His vengeance ? 
So reasoned Cromwell and the Army. Yet all should be done at least 
with a semblance of law. The Rump, as self-constituted sovereign, ap- 
pointed a High Court of Justice to try " the man Charles Stuart." The 
king took his stand on the plain and obvious fact that such a court had 
no conceivable authority. He refused to plead. No one could even pre- 
tend that the authority of the Court rested upon the will of the nation any 
more than it rested upon law. The nation stood aghast, half paralysed, 
while Fairfax and many others who had been appointed on the Commission 
refused to take part in the proceedings. The responsibility lay with those 
who had the power to enforce their way, and did not fear to do what they 
had persuaded themselves was their duty. In the eyes of the nation the 
king had committed no crime ; now he played his part with a sincerity and 
a dignity which carried the popular sympathy to his side ; and which for 
all time has clothed the figure of King Charles the Martyr with a halo of 
reverential pity. But the stern men who had doomed him did not shrink ; 
for them he was the enemy of God and of the people. The Court pro- 
nounced sentence of death, and England saw the head of its king fall under 
the executioner's axe. 



lo s 




CHAPTER XVII 

THE COMMONWEALTH 

I 

DROGHEDA AND WORCESTER 

ENGLISHMEN above all people in the world love adherence to precedent 
and custom ; but in the government of England, now, precedent and 
custom were toppled into the abyss. Hitherto, for some four centuries at 
least, king and parliament had shared authority, though with differences of 
opinion as to their respective proportions. No one had ever dreamed of 
such a thing as the arraigning of a king before his own subjects for treason. 
None except kings had ever challenged the right of free access to parlia- 
ment by its members, the right of freedom of debate, or the right of 
free decision. Kings, relying on the support of the will of the nation, 
had curbed barons ; barons relying on the same support had curbed 
kings ; kings had ruled autocratically when their policy harmonised with the 
national feelilig expressed in parliaments ; parliaments with the will of the 
people behind them had refused submission to kings. But the Great 
Rebellion had reached a climax, when the monarchy was abolished alto- 
gether, and the authority of parliament was scattered to the winds 
because parliament had ceased to represent the national will. 

In fact there was no national will, but a mere chaos of conflicting 
parties ; and out of this chaos had emerged one body strong enough to 
impose its will upon the rest. No other form of government was possible. 
That body had made up its mind to have done with the monarchy ; it did 
not wish to have done with parliament, but there were no visible means of 
procuring a parliament capable of exercising the functions of government. 
So it took the parliament that was there, purged it in accordance with its 
own views, abolished the House of Peers, and endeavoured to treat the Rump 
in the House of Commons as the Representative Assembly of the nation. 
Through the Rump it constructed an Executive Council, composed partly 
of military officers, partly of members of the Rump itself ; and Council 
and Rump together provided the government of the nation. The one thing 
vital for the moment was, for that government to establish and maintain its 
own authority, since reversion to chaos was the sole alternative. 

The new government was threatened on every side, from without as 
well as from within. As a regicide government, every state in Europe 

445 



446 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

would have rejoiced at its downfall, and not least Holland, w T hose young 
Stadtholder, William II., was brother-in-law to the claimant of the English 
throne. Scotland was righteously indignant ; for the people of England or 
their rulers had cut off the head of the King of Scotland, to whom the 
Scots had never ceased to profess loyalty, even when they were in arms 
against him, or when they handed him over to his English subjects. 
Moreover, Scotland was entirely hostile to the Sectaries, who had now 
taken control of affairs, and in particular to the Man who had led the 
Sectaries to victory. In Ireland, the death of Charles I. united against 
the regicide government the Cavalier element and the native Irish — to 
whom any English government was sufficiently detestable, but a rule at 
once English and Puritan was an abomination. In England itself, Cavalier 
loyalty and Presbyterian respectability were, according to circumstances, 
stung to fury or grievously shocked at the usurpation of Sectarians and 
regicides. Finally, in the victorious party itself, an angry spirit was aroused 
among many who had looked for liberty at least for themselves, and now 
saw, occupying the seats of the mighty, men who could not refrain if they 
would from acting despotically. Even of the fleet, a substantial portion 
declared at first against the new regime. 

The government weathered the storm. A stern and remorseless 
discipline arrested the mutinous spirit in the army ; in the navy, after the 
first moment of doubt, it became evident that the great preponderance lay 
with those who declared for loyalty to the Commonwealth. The last year's 
campaign had impressed upon Cavaliers and Presbyterians the futility of 
armed insurrection. Foreign Powers might be hostile, but they had other 
things to think of than intervention in English affairs. Scotland did not 
espouse the cause of Charles's son, would not even hasten to set the crown 
of Scotland itself on his head, until she had made her own terms with him. 
The pressing danger was in Ireland, where Cavaliers and Catholics together 
threatened to wipe out their opponents, and to provide a basis whence the 
combined elements of disaffection might organise an attack on the English 
Government. 

To Ireland, then, Cromwell was despatched in the August after the 
execution of King Charles ; and he dealt with that country on the general 
principle that his opponents were rebels ; at any rate that those humane 
modifications in the commonly recognised laws of war, which had habitually 
prevailed during the contest in England, were not to be applied in Ireland. 
Here, at least, he acted on the conviction that by striking ruthlessly at once 
he would make a prolonged war and prolonged bloodshed impossible. He 
turned upon Drogheda, stormed it when it refused to surrender, and no 
quarter was given to those in the town who were in arms. Then he fell 
upon Wexford, which was treated after the same fashion, though this time 
the slaughter was carried out by the soldiery without direct orders. The 
massacres of Drogheda and Wexford served their purpose. When Cromwell 
had made it clear that resistance in the first place was futile, and in the 



THE COMMONWEALTH 447 

second place would be punished without mercy, resistance practically dis- 
appeared. Garrison after garrison surrendered after being summoned, and 
there was little more actual bloodshed. Cromwell was perhaps right in 
believing that so far as the immediate war was concerned the truest mercy 
was in inercilessness. Moreover, he suffered from the conviction common 
to practically all Englishmen, for at least a century past, that the Irish were 
too barbarous to understand other methods than those of barbarism ; they 
were savages, controllable only by terrorism. For the rest, again in 
common with all Englishmen, he believed in the full tale of the atrocities 
committed in the Irish insurrection of 1641, and imagined that the worst 
he did fell far short of being a just punishment for the crimes of the past. 

Terror triumphed ; but Cromwell had not exacted the full penalty in 
the streets of Drogheda and Wexford. Sweeping confiscations of land 
followed, and numbers of the Puritan troopers were planted on Irish soil, 
to form an effective garrison for years to come. But if Cromwell's doings 
tended, as he believed, to save the effusion of blood, they sowed afresh the 
seeds of racial and religious hate, that monstrous crop which was to be 
reaped by generations upon generations as yet unborn, the black inheritance 
of the Curse of Cromwell. 

Before Cromwell was ready to leave the completion of his work in 
Ireland to his lieutenants, the clouds were gathering in the North. 
Scotland and England were bound together solely by the one link of the 
crown, and that link England herself had severed when she abolished her 
own monarchy by cutting off her own king's head and rejecting his suc- 
cessor. Her«.action was not binding upon Scotland ; was on the contrary 
entirely repudiated by Scotland ; which, with entire justification, declared 
it to be a flagrant breach of the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant — 
a Covenant which pledged both countries to loyalty to the person of the 
king. But if Scotland chose to acknowledge Charles II., the situation for 
England would manifestly be dangerous. 

Scotland would only acknowledge Charles on condition of his signing 
the Covenant. That most cynical of princes would, with perfect cheerfulness 
and entire good-nature, have signed a dozen covenants to gain his own 
ends, and would have torn them up afterwards as suited his convenience. 
But devoted loyalty, in the person of Montrose, was eager to set the young 
king on his throne untrammelled by ignominious promises. Charles always 
showed a gracious alacrity in encouraging his neighbours to self-sacrifice 
on his behalf. He temporised with the Scots from his safe quarters in 
Holland, while he suffered the heroic Montrose to go to his doom. The 
enterprise was hopeless. Montrose landed in Scotland, not in the regions 
where the kilted hosts were ready to flock to the standard of the brilliant 
leader who would launch them against the hated Argyle and the Campbells, 
but in the far north, where the nzme of McCallam Mohr roused no passionate 
hostility. Instead of gathering an increasing host, he soon found himself 
alone and deserted, was taken prisoner in Ross-shire, handed over to the 



448 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Government, and hanged as a traitor, leaving a heroic memory cherished 
by all lovers of self-sacrificing loyalty and splendid self-devotion. 

Since the " Great Marquis" had lost the hazard, Charles, with superb 
cynicism, accepted the terms offered him by the men who had just slain his 
most loyal servant as a traitor. He accepted the Covenant and landed in 
Scotland, where he probably learnt to feel something more akin to re- 
pentance than he suffered at any other time of his life. For Charles could 
endure hardship and privation, but he loathed seriousness, and in Scotland 
he had to wear the mask of seriousness every day and all day, and a specially 

lugubrious mask on the 
Sabbath. 

In Scotland, then, the 
nation had accepted a 
covenanted king, on whose 
person was focussed all the 
sentiment of loyalty in 
England which had been 
evoked by his father's 
tragedy. If he claimed 
the throne of England, 
there would be on his side 
not only the Cavaliers, but 
the whole weight of ortho- 
dox Presbyterianism, rein- 
forced by numbers of the 
moderate men who had 
been shocked by the high- 
handed illegality whereby the Commonwealth had been created. And 
behind Cavaliers and Presbyterians would be the Scots. Yet nothing 
could be more obvious than the right of the Scots, an independent nation 
over whom England exercised no jurisdiction whatever, to maintain the 
monarchy and to acknowledge the king in whose veins ran the blood of 
the Bruce. Once more the English government had before it the question 
whether government should be overthrown in the name of the law, or 
maintained by a palpable breach of law. Once more it resolved that the 
security of the State is the supreme law — and the security of the State 
demanded the coercion of Scotland. 

An initial difficulty presented itself. Fairfax, the General-in-Chief, now 
as before refused to act against his conscience. England had no moral right 
to coerce Scotland. He would not seek to impose his own will upon England, 
but he would not lead an army into Scotland. He was obdurate to Cromwell's 
persuasions. It was no ambition of his own which had set him in com- 
mand of the forces of the Commonwealth. His resignation was the only way 
out of the difficulty, and was accepted with more reluctance than it was offered. 
Cromwell became the General-in-Chief of the Commonwealth army. 

In July Cromwell was in Scotland, but the government of the Covenant 




The Scots keep their young king's nose to the grindstone. 

f From a broadside of 1651 satirising the acceptance of the 
Covenant by Charles II.] 



THE COMMONWEALTH 449 

would not listen to his arguments, and when he advanced upon Edinburgh 
he found that the skill of David Leslie had posted their troops impregnably. 
He had no alternative but to fall back upon Dunbar, followed and 
shepherded by the Scots. Supplies were running low, the Scottish 
generals were not to be outmanoeuvred, and it seemed that Cromwell would 
be driven to escape as best he could to the ships which were in attendance. 
He was saved by the unspeakable folly of the enemy. Leslie was over- 
ridden by the ignorant fanaticism of the clerical counsellors, who cried out 
to him to smite the blasphemers and sectaries whom the Lord had delivered 
into their hands. With amazement and thanksgiving, Cromwell saw the Scots 
repeating the supreme folly of Flodden and Pinkie-Cleugh, and defiling from 
the position in which to attack them would have been madness, apparently 
with the idea of cutting him off from the sea. As he had smitten them at 
Preston by hurling himself upon the centre of their straggling column, so 
now he smote them in the rout of Dunbar. He was as sure as the enemy 
themselves had been that this thing was the Lord's doing. 

But if it was the Scots whom the Lord had delivered into the hand of 
the English, and not vice versa, Dunbar did not by any means suffice to 
annihilate the Scottish resistance. Cromwell occupied Edinburgh, but 
Cavaliers and Covenanters in combination were still able to block his 
further advance and to reject his negotiations. His own activity was 
checked by illness, but in the spring he advanced upon Perth, with the 
effect which he had perhaps anticipated. The way lay open for a Scottish 
invasion of England ; and the Scots, carrying the king with them, seized 
their opportunity and marched for the Border. They entered England by 
the same route as before, streaming down through the Western Counties. 
Cromwell was swift to follow, while another English force, under Lambert, 
moved towards Worcester to intercept them. But the English Cavaliers 
and Presbyterians did not venture to rise. Cromwell following hard on 
the heels of the Scots overtook them at Worcester, and there won the 
crowning victory. The Scots army was shattered, the young king became 
a fugitive, and after sundry hair's-breadth escapes succeeded in finding 
at the village of Brighton a boat which carried him to safety across 
the Channel. It was never again necessary for Cromwell to take the 
field. 

In fact, the English Cavaliers, after the campaign of 1648, had despaired 
of further warfare on land and betaken themselves to the sea, where 
Prince Rupert appeared in a new role. He found, however, more than 
his match in the great admiral of the Commonwealth, Robert Blake ; who 
after the fashion of the times was placed in command of the fleet because 
he had proved his capacity as a soldier ashore. Blake swept Rupert off 
the English seas, and driving him into the Mediterranean laid the foundation 
of that English ascendency in the great inland sea which played so 
tremendous a part in her subsequent wars. The victory of Worcester 
laid Scotland at the mercy of England, and in that country the military 
control was left in the hands of General Monk. 

2 F 



45° 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



II 



THE RUMP 




The personality of Cromwell so completely overshadows that of any 
other man among his contemporaries, from Marston Moor to the day 

of his death, that we 
are somewhat apt to 
think of him as a 
military dictator who 
imposed his arbitrary 
will upon England 
throughout thatperiod. 
That conception, how- 
ever, is erroneous. 
Until after the battle 
of Preston, he did in- 
deed embody in his 
own person the will 
of the Army, but 
neither he nor the 
Army attempted to 
seize for themselves 
the functions of 
government. They 
stood only as the 
champions of liberty 
of conscience, battling 
for a settlement which 
should secure that 
liberty ; and their de- 
mands were urged 
under the sanction of their ability in the last resort to apply force. But 
Cromwell was so far from being a dictator that he did not succeed in 
inducing the actual government to make the settlement which he desired, 
though he prevented them from making the very different settlement 
which they desired. 

After Preston, the will of the Army, still embodied in Oliver, enforced 
the construction of a form of government intended to be as constitutional 
as the circumstances allowed ; a government whose first business was 
to make itself secure, because that seemed the primary condition without 
which peace could not be re-established. But neither in form nor in 
fact did Cromwell assume the political direction of that government. From 



Oliver Cromwell. 
[From a miniature by Samuel Cooper.] 



THE COMMONWEALTH 451 

the death of the king to the battle of Worcester, he was entirely engaged 
upon military duties, and upon the affairs of Ireland and Scotland, not 
upon the affairs of England, from which he was, for the most part, absent. 
Her affairs were in the hands of the Rump and the Council of State. It 
was not Cromwell who dictated the admirable administrative policy by 
which Sir Harry Vane on the Council, and Blake on the sea, reorganised 
the navy, and established England on an equality with Holland, as a Naval 
Power which had no other rival. It was not Cromwell who guided the 
financial policy which supplied the heavy demands of the Treasury from the 
estates of the Cavaliers. It was not Cromwell who refused toleration to 
, Anglicanism and Anglican services, and replaced Anglican incumbents by 
Presbyterians, Baptists, and Independents. Finally, it was not Cromwell 
who directed the foreign policy of the government. 

Long before Worcester was fought, the fleet had been reorganised by 
Vane, and the might of the English Navy had been established by Blake. 
England's one rival upon the seas was Holland, and commercially Eng- 
land was far behind Holland. The great Thirty Years' War had come 
to an end in the last year of King Charles I. The religious question on 
the Continent had been more or less solved by the virtual partition of 
Germany into Protestant States in the North and Catholic States in the 
South ; among which Austria retained an immense predominance, while 
the Imperial Crown was now permanently associated with the House of 
Hapsburg. But the mutterings of religious strife were not yet over ; and 
English Puritanism was still moved by the dream of a league of Protestantism 
against a still aggressive Catholicism. No European Power, however, was 
ready to offer the hand of friendship to the regicide Republic. The death 
of the Dutch Stadtholder in 1650 established in Holland an unqualified 
Republic, which was not disturbed by the birth of the posthumous son who 
grew up to become William III. ; and this change in Holland inspired a 
momentary hope in the English government of a Dutch alliance. But the 
English overtures were rejected ; so that the hostility engendered by com- 
mercial rivalry was allowed free play. 

England, then, since its proffered friendship was refused, assumed an 
aggressive attitude. About the time when Cromwell was winning the 
battle of Worcester, parliament was passing the Navigation Act. The 
enormous mass of the carrying trade of the world was in the hands of 
Holland. The Navigation Act renewed the ancient but ill-observed rule 
that English imports and exports must be carried either in English ships or 
in ships belonging to the exporting or importing country. The intention now 
was simply to deprive the Dutch of a large part of their carrying trade, and 
to transfer it to English bottoms. But further, the English government 
resolved to reassert its own dignity and authority, and to compel its own 
recognition, by insistence on the old rule of saluting the English flag in the 
narrow seas. If war resulted, so much the better. It would certainly be 
popular with the fleet, and probably with the merchants, because it was 



452 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

directed to English commercial expansion. That it was not viewed with 
favour by Cromwell or by the Army, which was desirous of friendship with 
the Protestant Powers, made it rather the more desirable from the point 
of view of the parliament men who were jealous of military influence. The 
Navigation Acts which writers generally conspire to describe as Cromwell's 
were not attributable to him at all. 

The Dutch war, which consequently began early in 1652, was waged 
with stubborn valour on both sides. So far as the fighting went it could 
never be claimed that either side showed a decisive superiority. Both sides 
had one or two admirals of the very highest class, and others who would 
be included in a large first-class list. Both fleets were full of excellent 
seamen ; and if one or the other got the upper hand for a time, the even 
balance was soon recovered. The commerce of both, however, suffered 
seriously, that of Holland disastrously ; and the English parliament lost 
popularity instead of gaining it as they had expected, although a salutary 
respect for the English Navy was inspired in the continental nations. 

Worcester had made the Commonwealth finally secure ; the govern- 
ment by the Rump and the Council of State, however well it had done its 
work, was an emergency government. The Rump saw no reason for 
changing the existing state of things ; they themselves were in control of 
the State, and formed an oligarchy which treated all appointments as a 
preserve for their own kinsmen and friends. They, not the Council of 
State, were actually the supreme authority, the fountainhead of law, the 
controllers of taxation, to whom the Executive authority of the Council of 
State was responsible. It was their very natural desire to perpetuate this 
arrangement. A representative parliament was out of the question. Such 
a parliament would have in it a large Cavalier element, and government by 
it would be impossible. Their own idea of the best thing for the country 
was to avoid the appearance of establishing themselves as a permanent 
oligarchy by summoning a new parliament ; but the sitting members, in 
their plan, were not to vacate their seats at all, and were to have the power 
of excluding from the new body such of the members returned as were not 
to their liking. 

This solution was not equally satisfactory to any one else. The Rump 
had forfeited the confidence both of the Army and of the general public ; 
Cromwell himself was ill pleased at the unfairness with which many 
Royalists were being treated. Members were more than suspected of 
bribery and corruption. There was no guarantee that if the oligarchy were 
perpetuated it would not develop into a self-seeking tyranny as intolerant 
as that of the Long Parliament before Pride's Purge. On the other hand, 
no clear plan had been formulated for the constitution of a satisfactory 
sovereign authority, and at the beginning of 1653 the Rump was pushing 
its own plan forward. 

Cromwell then urged that the scheme should be suspended, and that 
the first necessity was the formation of a committee of members of parlia- 



THE COMMONWEALTH 453 

ment and army officers to discuss the provision of proper securities against 
an arbitrary tyranny ; while the soldiers were demanding an immediate 
dissolution and the election of a Free Parliament, regardless of the fact 
that a Free Parliament in the existing circumstances would inevitably 
degenerate into a chaos of factions. The Rump, on the other hand, saw in 
its own scheme the only way of averting such a chaos or a military 
ascendency. On the day after he had extracted from several of the parlia- 
mentary leaders a promise not to proceed immediately with their bill, 
Cromwell learnt that the House had assembled and was pushing the bill 




Cromwell ejecting the Rump, 1653. 
[From a contemporary Dutch print.] 

through. Once more he found forced upon him the necessity for inter- 
vening arbitrarily on his own responsibility. If the parliament was the 
only body in England which had any semblance of legal authority, it was 
now using that authority to override every principle for which the Civil War 
had been fought. Cromwell, with a small band of soldiers behind him, 
burst into the Chamber, stormed at the members, summoned his followers 
to '* Remove that bauble," the mace, and ejected the Rump. 

The Rump was down ; but what was to take its place ? The General 
and his council of officers resorted to the desperate expedient of summon- 
ing a nominated assembly. The Independent congregations were instructed 
to send in a list of " fit and godly " persons, from whom Cromwell and the 



454 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

officer's selected one hundred and forty, who constituted the assembly- 
known to history as the Barebones Parliament, so called because one of 
its members bore the attractive name of Praise-God Barebone. It had 
no pretence of being a representative assembly; it was not much more 
than a fortuitous gathering of persons whose morals were unimpeachable 
and their intentions excellent, while they were wholly devoid of political 
knowledge and experience. The idea undoubtedly was that the assembly 
of nominees was to inaugurate the rule of the saints ; but the saints, lacking 
the wisdom of the serpent, were not at all likely to prove as harmless 
as doves. The more intelligent among them very soon realised the fact 
for themselves, rose up early one morning, met together, and passed 
sentence of dissolution on their own body. The experiment had failed 
ignominiously. Once more it was laid upon Cromwell and the officers 
of the Army to devise a scheme under which the government of the country 
could be carried on. 



Ill 
' I THE PROTECTORATE GOVERNMENTS 

The deliberations of the officers of the Army issued in the publication of 
the decree called the Instrument of Government. Until the overthrow 
of Charles I. the English constitution had been developed by regular 
growth. There had been no revolutions in the system, however violently 
dynastic changes had been effected. The Civil War had effected a revolu- 
tion and necessitated the invention of a constitution which had not grown 
out of the past, of which the most that could possibly be laid would be 
that a simulacrum or semblance of some features of the past was re- 
produced in it. The first experiment had produced the Rump, which 
was a travesty of a parliament, coupled with the Council of the State, 
which was a quite practical equivalent for the various forms which the 
Executive Council of the Crown had formerly taken. If the Rump had 
been a travesty, the Assembly of Nominees was a burlesque. Now in 
the Instrument of Government the Army officers made their third ex- 
periment the rough and ready framework for a constitution which affords 
an instructive contrast to the mathematical accuracy and the logical per- 
fection of the various impossible constitutions with which France was 
saddled when she started in the search for an ideal government in 
1789. 

The government must have a head, and the head of the government 
must have an Executive Council. Unless the head and his Council had very 
large powers, any government in the then state of England would be im- 
possible. On the other hand, the people had a right to a voice in affairs of 
state, and therefore must have a representative assembly. Practical sense 



THE COMMONWEALTH 455 

singled out one man as the only possible head, the man whose personality 
was irresistibly dominant, Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell then was to be 
Lord Protector, a title revived from times when a minor or an imbecile 
had occupied the throne and a practically regal authority had to be vested 
in a subject. The Executive power was vested in the Protector and the 
Council of State, which was a permanent body with power to fill up its own 
numbers. But neither Protector nor Council had the power of legislation 
or taxation, which, by the decree, were appropriated to a representative 
parliament entirely elective and forming a single Chamber. When the 
Chamber was not sitting the Executive could issue decrees, but those 
decrees had effect only until the 
parliament decided to abrogate 
or to confirm them. Cavaliers 
were not eligible to the House. 
The entire control of the Army 
lay with the Executive. The 
parliament was to meet not less 
than once in three years, and was 
in no case to be dissolved until 
it had been sitting for five months. 

The Protectorate of Oliver 
Cromwell began in December 
1653. Its sanction was nothing 
but the will of the Army and the 
sulky acquiescence of a nation 
which had no alternative. For 
something less than five years 
Cromwell's will was supreme. He 
had been primarly a champion of 
the liberties of parliament ; after the defeat of Charles I. he had been urgent 
in his endeavours to restrain the rising spirit of antagonism to the Crown as 
such, earnest in his pursuit of a compromise. Now the champion of liberty 
could find no way of ruling in England except by despotically imposing 
his own will on her. He did not want to dispense with parliaments ; 
throughout his rule he summoned them according to law ; but when they 
met, parliament and Protector habitually found themselves arriving at a 
deadlock, from which the only escape, just as in the case of parliament and 
Charles I., lay in th'e decisive assertion of the supremacy of one or the 
other. But, unlike Charles, Cromwell never had any difficulty in proving 
the decisiveness of his own supremacy. He had what Charles had not — 
the obvious superiority in physical force. There was no gainsaying the 
fact, and no failure in the Army's loyalty to its chief, whose ideals it 
shared. 

The nine months which passed between the establishment of the Pro- 
tectorate and the convening of the first parliament gave opportunity for 




The Great Seal of the Commonwealth, 1651. 



456 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Cromwell to show what kind of ideals were working in his heart and brain. 
Cromwell, more effectively than any of his predecessors, grasped at the 
icfta of the union of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a union which should 
not destroy national differentiation. Scotland and Ireland were to have 
their share of representation at Westminster as members of the Common- 
wealth. The Executive Government of Scotland remained in the hands 
of a Scottish Council, though the Englishmen upon it were for the present 
the controlling force, and the troops under arms were Commonwealth 
troops. The treatment of Ireland was vitiated by the principle which 
virtually recognised only the Puritan settlers as free citizens. Freedom of 

trade within the Commonwealth 
was an invaluable boon to the 
two poorer communities ; what- 
ever benefits England derived 
from the Navigation Act they 
shared, as also did the colonies. 

In England itself the religious 
question was still the one of 
primary importance, and tolera- 
tion was Cromwell's ruling prin- 
ciple, accompanied by the doctrine 
that religion should be maintained 
out of public funds. The ex- 
clusion of Anglicanism from the 
churches Cromwell admitted as a 
political necessity ; but the tithes 
and endowments were neither 
abolished nor secularised, but 
were applied to what was virtually 
the concurrent endowments of the three principal religious bodies outside 
the Anglicans and Roman Catholics — the Presbyterians, Baptists, and In- 
dependents. Anglicanism was repressed, because the assembling of Anglican 
congregations would have provided the nucleus for Cavalier disaffection. 
But besides the bodies among whom churches and parsonages and their 
endowments were distributed, the sects were free to form and maintain 
congregations of their own. That liberty was extended even to the 
Quakers, whose peculiarities rendered them obnoxious to every other 
religious denomination for varying reasons. It was Cromwell's govern- 
ment which at last after three centuries and a half readmitted the Jews 
to England. 

Once more, it was Cromwell who at last initiated for England an 
active foreign policy rooted in Protestantism. The obstinate struggle with 
the Dutch was brought to an end, and already in 1654 Cromwell was 
contemplating the use of the mighty fleet which the Commonwealth had 
created, for battle not with the Protestant Dutch but with the Spanish 




The Great Seal of the Commonwealth, 165 1. 



THE COMMONWEALTH 457 

power, which still to him, as to the Elizabethans, seemed the champion of 
aggressive Papistry. 

The idea that the Instrument of Government could be used as a step 
towards the real revival of a Free Parliament was soon dispelled,, The 
country had learnt to hate the Rump, but it had not learnt to love a military 
domination. The representatives who came up to Westminster in September 
1654 were not at all satisfied with the Instrument of Government. Crom- 
well gave them to understand that they had been assembled to attend to 
business, not to reconstruct the constitution ; but constitution making is an 
amusement from which popular assemblies in revolutionary times are 
seldom capable of abstaining. In spite of the exclusion of a hundred 
members, who declined to accept the Instrument, the remainder still per- 
sisted in proposing changes. Among other things they suggested that, 
in place of maintaining toleration on its present lines, there should be a 
definition of heresy, followed by the suppression of heretics. Of course, 
at bottom, the question at stake was whether the real government of 
the country should be vested in parliament or in the Protector. From the 
point of view of the Army the Protector's powers were necessary to the 
preservation of the State. Backed by the sentiment of the Army, Cromwell 
seized the earliest possible moment to dissolve the obstinate parliament, 
even straining the letter of the law by interpreting the five months' minimum 
as meaning lunar months, not calendar months. 

The constitution propounded under the Instrument of Government 
did not require the summoning of another parliament until after a consider- 
able interval. During that interval the fact of the Military Dictatorship 
became more palpable than ever. A perfectly futile Cavalier rising at 
Salisbury, dignified by the name of Penruddock's Rebellion, was the occasion 
of the demonstration. The government was not endangered by this foolish 
and abortive performance, but it was significant of the prevailing unrest, of 
the undercurrent of feeling that a government so unpopular must be easily 
destroyed. The government was unpopular, not so much because the 
things it did were wrong as because the authority by which they were done 
was a usurped authority, a military authority, a thing hitherto unheard of 
in England. Englishmen had a lively sense in themselves that they would 
rather be ill-governed by their own representatives than enjoy any amount 
of benefits thrust upon them by a power whose sanction was the sword. 
Toleration was good in itself, but the number of people in the country who 
wanted toleration except for their own private " doxy "' was small. They 
did not want toleration for Quakers, whom they did not understand in the 
least. They did not want toleration for the Fifth- Monarchy men, who 
imagined that the world had been ruled successively by four great empires 
in the past — the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman — 
and that now the " fifth empire " had begun, the rule of the Saints whose 
monarch was Christ. And they did not want to have toleration for any 
one forced upon them by gentlemen with a Bible in one hand and a sword 



458 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in the other, and texts out of the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in 

their mouths. 

Penruddock's Rebellion was the symptom- of this unrest, and the only 
answer to it was the uncompromising assertion of the authority of the 
government. All semblance of popular liberty disappeared when Cromwell 
mapped out the country into eleven military districts, and set over each 
district a major-general, who was the supreme administrative authority. 
Like Strafford himself, the major-generals ruled without fear or favour, deal- 
ing out justice with an even hand. But if Strafford's rule, resting on the 
authority of the king, was intolerable, the rule of major-generals, whose 
authority rested on the Army, was still more so. Moreover, the exigencies of 
the case compelled Cromwell to adopt expedients which he had quite rightly 
condemned when the Rump had employed them. Money was needed, and 
the extra money was extracted from the estates of one class of the community, 
the Cavaliers ; and under these conditions the oppression of the Cavaliers 
excited a new popular sympathy. And to all these causes of discontent must 
be added the austerity of a Puritanism which sternly repressed an unseemly 
indulgence in the carnal pleasures of the ungodly ; including most innocent 
forms of amusement. 

Cromwell's second parliament met two years after the first. It is note- 
worthy that it embodied popular resentment not against Cromwell personally 
but against the Army. It recognised in Cromwell himself the indispensable 
man. Like its predecessor, this parliament too was " purged " by the ex- 
clusion of about a hundred members. The successes attending the Pro- 
tector's foreign policy, to which we shall presently revert, increased his 
personal prestige. The discovery of a plot against his life awakened a vivid 
consciousness that Oliver himself was the keystone of the arch, the structure 
of the Commonwealth, which would collapse in ruin if he were removed. It 
seemed necessary at least that the Commonwealth constitution should be 
modified in two directions. The office cf the Protector must be so modified 
that its functions could be efficiently discharged without danger to the State 
when Oliver himself should be no longer Protector ; and the power of the 
Army itself must be reduced, even if in the process the personal authority of 
the Protector himself were increased. 

A new constitution, then, was promulgated by the parliament, under the 
name of the Humble Petition and Advice, after the major-generals had been 
withdrawn and a bill sanctioning the taxation of Cavalier estates had been 
thrown out. It must be remembered that Cromwell's arbitrary powers were 
suspended whilst parliament was in session. The Petition went so far as to 
make the office of Protector permanent, to empower Cromwell to nominate 
his own successor, and actually to offer him the title of king. The Rump 
had been intolerable because there had been no check on the arbitrary exer- 
cise of authority by a single Chamber. The Petition sought to prevent the 
resuscitation of this danger by reconstituting a second Chamber, a new 
House of Lords nominated by Cromwell but subject to the approval of the 



THE COMMONWEALTH 459 

House of Commons. On the other hand, the Protector was to surrender 
the right which he possessed under the Instrument of Government of arbi- 
trarily excluding members from the Commons. The principle was at the 
same time formally laid down that all forms of Christian religion were to be 
tolerated except the Romanist and the Episcopalian. Socinianism, which 
rejects the Divinity of Christ, was outside the pale. 

The Humble Petition and Advice was accepted and became law, with the 
exception of one point. Oliver declined the title of king, not, it would 
appear, without reluctance. But a sufficient reason for the refusal must be 
found in the strong antagonism of 
the Army to the proposal. Oliver 
could not afford to make the army 
hostile. Policy, too, demanded 
the refusal for other reasons, since 
in Englishmen's minds at least 
the idea of kingship was hedged 
about with the traditions of long 
centuries, traditions belonging to 
the office, not the individual, and 
wholly incompatible with the 
elevation to that office of a man 
with whom they could by no 
possibility be associated. In a 
minor degree the prestige even 
of the new House of Lords was 
similarly threatened ; it was remote from the associations which gave dignity 
at least to the old House of Peers. 

Nine months had elapsed between the first meeting of the new parliament 
and the installation of the Protector under the new constitution. Parliament 
was not dissolved but prorogued, and met again in the following January, 
1658. But a change was at once apparent. The pick of Oliver's supporters 
had been transferred to the Upper Chamber, and the hundred elected 
members of the Lower House whom he had excluded were necessarily ad- 
mitted under the new constitution. Thus, there was really a new House of 
Commons, which at once proceeded to attack the constitution which a 
parliament nominally the same had only just set up. Almost its first move- 
ment was to attack the new House of Lords in the endeavour to re-create 
that despotism of the House of Commons, the curbing of which was the 
precise object with which the Second Chamber had been constituted. Once 
more the attempt to invent a working constitution had failed. Once more 
Oliver had no alternative but to assert his own supremacy. He dissolved 
his second parliament. Alone upon his own shoulders he bore the burden 
of the State during the few months of life which remained to him. 




A dinner-party under the Protectorate. 

[From the English edition of the Jantaz Linguarum of 
Comenius. ] 



460 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



IV 
FOREIGN POLICY 

A system of government which depends for its effectiveness upon one 
man of exceptional capacity and unique moral force cannot be permanent. 
It was created in England under the Commonwealth because the man was 
there ; the old system had broken down, and for the time being there was no 
practical possibility either of reconstructing it or of setting up any other in 
its place. The period of the Commonwealth presents a breach in the con- 
tinuity of constitutional development which was resumed with the Restoration. 
For the first and the only time in English history England had attempted to 
break with tradition, and the experiment collapsed with the disappearance of 
the great figure in whom it had centred. But it is remarkable that in the 
course of the experiment England won for herself such prestige as she had 
before known only in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, in Henry V.'s 
day of triumph, and during a part of the reign of Edward III. 

After the storm of the great Civil War, England, instead of being exhausted, 
organised the most powerful navy afloat and could put in the field troops 
superior to any in Europe. She could interfere with effect on the Continent, 
and made her alliance desired by States which at first refused even to 
recognise the regicide Commonwealth. The fighting strength of the Puritan 
soldiery and mariners lay in the combination of complete discipline with 
religious enthusiasm, superimposed upon the normal qualities of Englishmen. 
Officered by men selected on account of their proved capacity, while the 
services were moulded by organisers of the highest class, English fleets and 
English troops could go anywhere and do anything if they felt themselves to 
be fighting for The Cause. Even with baser and more material incentives 
they played their part manfully, as in the Dutch War, a war in which the 
religious motive had no place. 

Cromwell, then, had the instrument to his hand for carrying out an 
aggressive Protestant policy ; and to guide him in such a policy he had the 
Elizabethan tradition, the tradition not of Elizabeth herself but of the 
Elizabethan seamen. That tradition fixed upon Spain as the enemy of 
Protestantism and the legitimate prey of Protestant sailormen. Cromwell 
had hardly made his peace with the Dutch, very advantageously for England, 
when he turned his eyes upon Spain as the fitting object of attack by English 
ships. But for once he blundered into under-rating the efficiency of the 
enemy and the quality of the force required to attack him within his own 
seas. Although there was no war between England and Spain, a fleet was 
despatched across the Atlantic at the end of 1654, under the Admirals Penn 
and Venables, which found itself under orders for the Spanish Main. But 
the fleet had been fitted out hastily and carelessly. It failed completely 



THE COMMONWEALTH 461 

before Cartagena; Dut, while retreating, it seized upon the then very slightly 
inhabited island of Jamaica, which was thenceforward retained as an 
English colony. The result was a declaration of open war between Spain 
and England. 

The challenge to Spain was thrown down quite in the Elizabethan spirit, 
and precisely on the old excuses, that Spain treated the wealth of South 
America as a private preserve, and that English sailors in Spanish ports were 
refused the free practice of their religion. When the two countries were at 
open war again the blunder of the first expedition was not repeated. The 
work to be done was placed in the competent hands of Blake, who had just 
been congenially occupied in smiting the swarms of Arab and Berber pirates 
who infested the African shores of the Mediterranean. Blake blockaded the 
Spanish coasts, and one of the incidents especially favourable to Cromwell at 
the moment when his second parliament was called in 1556 was the arrival 
in England of a Spanish prize laden with vast wealth. The most striking of 
all Blake's victories was that achieved in the following year, when he drove 
the Spanish fleet to take shelter under the guns of Teneriffe, silenced the 
land-batteries with his own guns, sailed in, and sank the Spanish fleet without 
losing a ship of his own. 

Before opening his attack on Spain there was perhaps some uncertainty 
in Cromwell's mind as to the correctness of that policy. Puritanism hesitated 
to decide whether France or Spain was the real foe of Protestanism. France 
and Spain were anyhow at enmity with each other, their quarrel having been 
left undecided when the Thirty Years' War was brought to a close by the 
Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Richelieu, and after Richelieu Mazarin, in 
France, aimed at the policy of toleration within the country, the policy 
of the Henry IV. tradition, the policy of national consolidation. Political 
factions, however, had associated themselves with the religious parties for 
their own ends, and Spain, in order to foster disintegration in France, was 
giving support to the Huguenots. But when Cromwell made overtures to 
Spain, he immediately found that she was as bigoted as ever in her Romanism. 
Hence he attacked her without waiting for a French alliance. Indeed, he 
was quite ready to fight France as well as Spain in the cause of Protestantism ; 
and, even while his fleets were pursuing their first unsuccessful career in the 
West Indies, he was threatening France with armed intervention on behalf 
of the Vaudois, the Protestant mountaineers who were suffering from the per- 
secution of the Duke of Savoy. The persecution was stopped, and the 
French government welcomed an English alliance, to be directed against 
Spain. 

The sham religious basis of the civil troubles in France itself broke down, 
and the armies of the state were captained by the Huguenot Turenne. In 
1657 the Anglo-French alliance was completed. In 1658, the last year of 
Cromwell's life, English Puritan troops were fighting under Turenne in the 
Spanish Netherlands, winning in June the battle of the Dunes, which gave 
-Dunkirk to England as her share in the spoils of the alliance. A hundred 



462 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

years after the loss of Calais England once more had a foothold on the 
Continent. 

Ostensibly the continuity of Cromwell's foreign policy was preserved by 
Charles II. at the Restoration — ostensibly, because the French alliance re- 
mained in force. But the whole meaning of the policy was changed. 
Cromwell united England with a Power which appeared likely to recognise 
the principle of toleration more thoroughly than any other, and which had 
every political inducement to stand in antagonism to the Hapsburg leaders of 
aggressive Romanism. England and Holland together could sweep the seas. 
England, Holland, and France together could dictate at least toleration to 
the Catholic States. If France played her allies false, England, with her new 
Calais and with Holland behind her, could be dangerous on land, and her 
fleets would be able to command the Mediterranean as well as the Channel 
and the French Atlantic ports. 

Cromwell's scheme was perhaps fundamentally erroneous, because the 
time was past for the opposition between Catholic and Protestant to be 
made the basis of a national policy. Also it was no doubt a fundamentally 
false position for England to seek deliberately to involve herself in the affairs 
of the Continent. She would not have been able to bear the strain of posing 
as a Power of the first magnitude both on sea and on land. It was an error 
also to seek war rather than to seek peace. But it was for none of these 
reasons that Cromwell's policy actually failed after Cromwell was dead. It 
failed because Charles II. deliberately played into the hands of France and 
helped the aggrandisement of France, precisely when, if Cromwell had been 
alive, she would have found herself under the necessity of adapting her 
policy to that of the Protector or else of facing the immediate and vigorous 
hostility of the Puritan fleets and armies. In fact Cromwell's foreign policy, 
like his government in England, was powerful and effective so long as Crom- 
well himself was at the head of affairs. It would have failed even with a 
second-rate Cromwell. But with Charles, who skilfully preserved its out- 
ward semblance while entirely transforming its spirit and intention, it was 
more than a failure ; it was converted into an instrument for the aggrandise- 
ment of Louis XIV. Yet for England one feature of the Commonwealth 
foreign policy survived, the feature which made the preservation of naval 
supremacy supreme over all other considerations. 

The battle of the Dunes was the last triumph of the Puritan arms. 
Cromwell was not yet sixty years old, but his mortal frame was worn out by 
the tremendous labours and responsibilities which had fallen to his lot for the 
last fifteen years. Two of his great victories, those of Dunbar and Wor- 
cester, had been won on the 3rd of September. On the 3rd of September 
his great lonely soul passed away. Three days before a terrific storm had 
burst over England; "the devil," the Cavaliers said, "had come to claim his 
own." But Cromwell went before another Judgment Seat than that of the 
Cavaliers. 



THE COMMONWEALTH 463 



THE END OF THE COMMONWEALTH 

Oliver had refused the crown, nevertheless it appeared that he had some 
thought at least of creating a dynasty ; for on his deathbed he named as his 
successor his son Richard. For that choice there can be no other explanation. 
Cromwell cannot have imagined that Richard could take his own place as the 
Atlas bearing the Commonwealth upon his shoulders. The younger son 
Henry was a man of capacity, who may have been ruled out because of his 
fiery temper. But Richard was wholly incapable of 
serving as anything more than figurehead, nor had 
any man come to the front who was in the least 
fitted to maintain an autocratic' rule. The Common- 
wealth required a ruler, who, whether he was in 
form an autocrat or not, should be one in actual fact. 

In January a new parliament was assembled. 
No one challenged the nominal position of the 
Protector ; no one recognised his authority as a 
reality. The immediate question was merely whether 
the parliament or the officers of the Army were 
to be the supreme authority. The officers had 
fixed upon Fleetwood, a capable soldier and Crom- Richard Cromwell. 

Well's OWn SOn-in-laW, for the Vacant pOSt Of [From a miniature by Samuel Cooper, 

General-in-Chief. 'Had Fairfax been an ambitious 

man, he might have formed a party of his own in spite of his abstention from 
public life for the last eight years ; but he chose to remain in retirement. 
Parliament, intent on asserting its own authority, proposed that Richard 
Cromwell should be made General-in-Chief. Richard, as the head of an 
army, would have been absurd, but the calculation was that the army would 
obey its chief, and its chief would obey parliament. The officers had no 
intention of submitting to such an arrangement. There was among them no 
personality of commanding force, but the most active of their leaders was 
Lambert. The Protector, incapable of taking a line of his own, submitted to 
the pressure of Lambert and the officers, dissolved parliament in May, and 
finished the farce of his Protectorship by resigning. Once more the country 
was without any government which could pretend to a legal title. 

Still the Army did not wish to assume official responsibility for the 
government of the State. Lambert devised the plan of resuscitating the 
Rump which Oliver had turned out of doors. Here was at least a sort of 
parliament, whose members had been elected, which, by the Statute of 1641, 
could never be dissolved except by its own consent. In fact it never had 
been legally dissolved ; it had only been illegally suppressed by an arbitrary 
authority. In short, the members of the Long Parliament could clearly 





464 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

claim as a matter of mere law that they were to this day the legal House of 
Commons ; though it would not be so easy to prove that the Commons by 
themselves legally constituted a parliament, or that the Rump by itself could 
claim to be the legal House of Commons so long as those other members 
were shut out who had been excluded by Pride's Purge. 

The Rump, however, had no qualms. From December 1640 down to 
Cromwell's coup d'etat it had acted as the sovereign body of the realm, and 
had all but succeeded in establishing itself permanently. It was still per- 
suaded that it was the legitimate sovereign, and it acted upon that doctrine. 
It at once assumed the tone of high authority over the soldiers who had re- 
instated it, threatened to declare all the proceedings of the Protectorate 

invalid, and showed every 
sign of intending to revive 
all the old pretensions 
which had made its ejection 
by Cromwell temporarily 
popular. The Cavaliers im- 
agined that they had found 
their opportunity in the dis- 
sensions at headquarters ; 
but if the Army was politi- 
cally at sea, it understood 
at least its own business of 
fighting. The insurrection 
was crushed at Winnington Bridge, and Lambert returned from this campaign 
resolved on another coup d'etat. The Rump found itself shut out from the 
Chamber. But Lambert was no Cromwell ; departmental management was 
going to pieces, and the soldiery discovered that their pay was not forth- 
coming. Before New Year's Day the Rump was back again. But on New 
Year's Day, General Monk crossed the Scottish Border into England to take 
control of affairs on his own responsibility. 

For eight years past Monk had been practically the ruler of Scotland. 
For the greater part of the time he had held supreme command of the 
Commonwealth Army of ten thousand men in that country. The administra- 
tion had been in the hands of a small Council containing a majority of 
Englishmen, and in that Council Monk himself was the controlling force. 
Strong, clear-headed, and imperturbable, he was moved by no extravagant 
dreams of personal ambition. He was perfectly loyal to Oliver, as he would 
have been perfectly loyal to any established government, simply because it 
was the government. As Cromwell's lieutenant he ruled with a firm hand 
in the realm of which he was in charge ; he would have continued to do so 
as Richard Cromwell's lieutenant if Richard had not chosen first to prove 
himself impossible, and then to abdicate. But when " Tumbledown Dick," 
as the great Protector's son was popularly called, vacated his office, and 
Lambert would neither grasp the reins himself nor set anybody else in the 



Unite, or sovereign, of the Commonwealth, 1660. 
[The only English coins with legends in English.] 



THE COMMONWEALTH 465 

saddle, Monk began to think it was time for some one to take a hand and 
deal with the state of the nation in a business-like fashion. Monk had been 
attending strictly to his own business in Scotland, and when he crossed the 
Border at the head of his troops he had not made up his mind to anything 
more definite than the attempt to set up a stable government in which, when 
it should be set up, he himself had no intention of playing the part of 
Cromwell. It was not till he was in England, and felt himself in touch with 
public sentiment, that he arrived at the definite conclusion that England 
must have either a Cromwell or a Stuart Restoration. 

Fairfax issued from his retirement to join Monk at York, and his doing 
so was at once accepted by public opinion as a guarantee that Monk was him- 
self to be trusted. For Monk was a dark horse, but no one had a doubt of 
Fairfax's single-minded integrity and public spirit. 

Five weeks after crossing the Border, Monk was in London. He had 
arrived without any intention of effecting a revolution ; with the object of 
maintaining Oliver's principles, which were incompatible with the ascendency 
of either Cavaliers or Presbyterians. But the fact immediately presented 
itself that neither the Rump nor the Army officers represented public opinion 
or the principles of Cromwell. He had hardly arrived when the city of 
London announced its refusal to pay taxes at the bidding of a so-called 
parliament in which it was unrepresented. There and then, with the ap- 
proval of his own officers, he sent to the Rump a demand that writs should 
be issued forthwith for filling the vacant seats — there were hardly over forty 
members sitting — and that arrangements should be made for a dissolution 
and a free parliament within three months. The Rump ignored the demand, 
whereupon Monk summoned the rest of the surviving members of the Long 
Parliament, who still had precisely the same title as the Rump to take their 
seats. The Rump was swamped by a majority which forthwith voted for a 
dissolution and the summoning of a new parliament. 

Neither Monk nor the nation had taken long to recognise that the time 
for experiments was past. A Military Dictatorship had been tolerable only 
because the Dictator was Oliver Cromwell. The sole possible form of settled 
government was a Stuart restoration under guarantees for the liberties of 
parliament. Monk immediately entered on negotiations with Charles in 
Holland, with the result that the Declaration of Breda was issued. Charles 
proclaimed his readiness to grant a free pardon to every one not specially 
excepted by parliament. There should be no disturbance of the conditions 
of landownership established during the interregnum. There should be no 
penalties for religious opinions unless they were subversive of public order. 
Immediately after the publication of the Declaration the new parliament met. 
The disabilities imposed on the Cavaliers under the Commonwealth were 
ignored, and there were present a substantial Cavalier element and a still 
more substantial Presbyterian element, now readily converted to a royalism 
which seemed to have promised toleration, and at least guaranteed deliverance 
from the rule of sectaries and men of the sword. The soldiery might have 

2 G 



4 66 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

defied them if there had been any chief to whom they could rally as they 
had rallied in the past to Cromwell; but they were as sheep having no 
shepherd. A great reactionary wave of royalism swept over the country, 
and parliament and people with a strange enthusiasm summoned the unknown 
king from over the water to come and enjoy his own again. On May 2* 
applauding crowds hailed Charles on his landing at Dover, and four days 
later he made his entry into London. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE RESTORATION 

I 

THE KING'S RETURN 

The great bulk of the nation hailed the restoration of Charles II. with delight. 
The Protectorate had been in effect a despotism, resting upon the support 
not of the nation but of the army which had itself represented the sectaries. 
It had been detested alike by the Cavaliers, by the mass of the Presbyterians,, 
and by the Constitutionalists, whose cause had been that of the supremacy of 
parliament. Through the return of the king the Cavaliers hoped to obtain 
restitution if not revenge. The Presbyterians, while they knew that 
Anglicanism must be restored, nevertheless counted upon the extension of 
complete toleration to themselves. The Constitutionalists felt assured that 
there would be no attempts to resuscitate the claim of the Crown to arbitrary 
powers which had been abolished by statute before the actual outbreak of 
the Civil War. Even the sectaries acquiesced in view of the promises of 
toleration. , 

No one knew the mind of the new king, nor did he intend any one to 
know ft. Throughout his reign he succeeded in completely hoodwinking 
not only the nation at large but his own ministers. For him there was one 
consideration which controlled all others — he did not intend to go on his 
travels again ; therefore he would not set public opinion at defiance until he 
had placed his own power on a footing which would secure him against all 
risks. He intended to secure that power, and had no moral scruples what- 
ever as to methods ; but it was imperative that his purpose should not be 
suspected, and he concealed his deep political design under a mask of reckless 
frivolity which at once gave free play to his own natural inclinations and 
disarmed suspicion. 

It was the business of the Convention — so called because, not having 

been summoned by the royal authority, it was not in strictly technical 

form a parliament — to deal only with the immediate settlement of the most 

urgent questions. It set about its task on the lines of compromise. The 

lands of Cavaliers which had been sequestrated by the Commonwealth 

Government were restored, but the lands which had passed out of their 

possession by sale remained in the hands of the purchasers. An Act of 

Indemnity and Oblivion was passed, though it was denounced by the Cavaliers 

. as one of indemnity for the king's enemies and oblivion for his friends, From 

467 



468 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the general pardon regicides were formally excluded, though vindictiveness 
added to their number Sir Harry Vane, and went so far as to exhume the 
bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, the President of the High Court 
of Justice, in order to inflict upon them the penalties of treason. The claims 
of the soldiers to arrears of pay were met, and the Army itself was disbanded, 
though a fanatical outbreak of the group who called themselves Fifth 

Monarchy men gave a warrant 
for the retention, in the in- 
terests of public order, of the 
regiments which had marched 
from Scotland with Monk, who 
were formed into the Cold- 
stream Guards. It was not 
realised at the time, unless by 
Charles himself, that the nuc- 
leus of a Standing Army was 
thus provided. 

At the same time the great 
question of taxation was de- 
finitely settled, somewhat on 
the lines of the "Great Con- 
tract" proposed by Robert 
Cecil fifty years before. The 
Crown was granted a fixed 
revenue, conferred for life, in 
return for which it surrendered 
all the old claims for feudal 
dues and for the imposition of 
indirect taxation — direct taxa- 
tion was admittedly not within 
the power of the Crown. The 
revenue thus provided, being 
insufficient for the purposes of 
administration, required to be 
supplemented by parliamentary grants, and thus the suspension of parlia- 
ment was rendered impossible. So at least it seemed, for the parliament 
had not reckoned that the King of England might obtain extraneous supplies 
by becoming the pensioner of the King of France. The arbitrary Courts of 
Justice, abolished in 1641, were dead, nor was there any attempt made to 
revive the claim of the Crown to the power of arbitrary imprisonment. The 
whole of the settlement by the Convention Parliament was in strict accord- 
ance with the constitutional principles which had been asserted by the Long 
Parliament while it was still a practically unanimous body. 

The convention was an English parliament. The Protectorate had in- 
corporated the legislatures of Scotland and Ireland with that of England. 




Charles II. 
[ After the engraving by Vanderbanc. ] 



THE RESTORATION 469 

The Restoration cancelled the Union ; as before, Scotland and Ireland 
resumed their separate legislatures. They had acquiesced in the Union, not 
without some resentment, since in Scotland at least the incorporation was 
felt to be subordination, in spite of the commercial advantages accruing from 
the removal of commercial disabilities. The Union had not been the out- 
come of a national demand in any of the three countries ; it had been a piece 
of policy on the part of the Government in England. Scotland demanded 
its dissolution, and Charles was well aware that it was to his personal advan- 
tage, to the advantage of the Crown, to have three kingdoms to deal with 
instead of one. 



II 

CLARENDON 

The primary business of the Restoration was settled by the Convention. 
The acuteness of Charles and the shrewdness of his chief counsellor Edward 
Hyde, who was shortly afterwards made Earl of Clarendon, prevented it, by 
means of the amnesty and the land settlement, from being converted into a 
partisan triumph for the Cavaliers, while the disbanding of the Army removed 
all danger of armed insurrection. On the other hand, the revenue settlement 
made it impossible, for the time at least, that the Crown should attempt to 
dispense with parliaments. But Hyde had successfully postponed one ques- 
tion of vital importance, the settlement of the religious problem. This was 
to be dealt with by a new parliament regularly summoned by the king, not 
by the Convention. The Presbyterians were hardly nervous. They were 
carefully encouraged to believe that all would be well with them. There 
was to be a conference of divines as a preliminary to settlement, and in the 
meanwhile the king nominated leading Presbyterians among his private 
chaplains. 

But bitter disappointment was in store. The Savoy Conference, the 
meeting of the divines, came to nothing. The Royalist reaction in the country 
resulted in the return of a Parliament in which there was a great prepon- 
derance of Cavaliers, many of them young men whose sympathies were 
vehemently Anglican and anti-Puritan. Clarendon himself was intensely 
Anglican. He had originally been prominent among the moderate Constitu- 
tionalists in the first days of the Long Parliament, and had led the resistance 
in the Commons to the Puritan attack upon the Episcopate and to the Grand 
Remonstrance. With Falkland he had joined the Royalists, had been a 
leading member of the councils of Charles I., and had remained the Chief 
Minister, if that term may be used, of Charles II. during his exile. Now, at 
the Restoration, he was not unfaithful to his old ideals. He was no advocate 
of absolutism, and his stiff solemnity made him distasteful to the Cavaliers, 
and especially to the court, which soon became notorious for its frivolity and 



470 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

licentiousness. But he was at one with the Cavaliers in the determination 
to restore the supremacy of Anglicanism. 

Clarendon's ecclesiastical policy took shape in the series of enactments 
which are known as the Clarendon Code. Already the spirit of the new 
parliament had made itself manifest. It restored the bishops to the House 
of Lords, and ordered the Solemn League and Covenant to be publicly burnt 
by the hangman, besides denouncing all levying of war against the king. 
The first measure of the Code, which came at the end of the year 1661, was 
the Corporation Act, which required every member of a corporation to re- 
nounce the Covenant, to affirm that it was unlawful to take arms against the 
king, and to take the Sacrament according to the rights of the Anglican 

Church. The Corporation Act was followed 
up by the Act of Uniformity, which re- 
quired every incumbent who had not already 
received the Anglican ordination to do so 
before St. Bartholomew's Day. Ordination 
was to be in future the condition of holding 
any ecclesiastical preferment. The clergy 
were to declare their complete acceptance 
of everything laid down in the Prayer-book, 
and not only the clergy, but teachers of all 
sorts were to take the oaths required under 
the Corporation Act. An immense number 
of livings were now occupied by Presby- 
terians who had not received episcopal or- 
dination. These men stood loyal to their 
convictions with a wonderful unanimity. 
More than two thousand of them resigned 
their livings, and the great Presbyterian body became a sect outside the 
established Church ; that is, for the first time, the Nonconformists separated 
themselves definitely from the official ecclesiastical organisation. 

The expulsion of the Presbyterians from the pulpits which they had so 
long occupied might have been excused as a warrantable retaliation for the 
expulsion of the Anglicans under the Puritan regime, although at the best it 
was a manifestly vindictive measure. It was a severe blow to Nonconformity ; 
still it left the Nonconformists free to worship as their own consciences pre- 
scribed. But two years after the Act of Uniformity came the Conventicle 
Act, which forbade, under severe penalties, all assemblies for public worship, 
under other forms than those of the Church, at which there were gathered 
more than four persons besides the members of the household. 

Still more outrageous was the Five Mile Act, which followed the devasta- 
tions of the Great Plague which fell upon London in 1665. During that year 
more than a hundred thousand persons died beneath that fearful scourge. 
Multitudes fled from London ; those who remained hardly dared to leave 
their houses lest they should come in contact with infection ; still less would 




Edmund Hyde, Lord Clarendon. 
[After the portrait by Loggan.] 



THE RESTORATION 471 

they dare to enter the house of their neighbour. In those terrible months the 
ejected ministers displayed a more splendid spirit of self-sacrifice than their 
Anglican successors, who failed in their dangerous duty. Fear that the Non- 
conformists would recover their ascendency drove the parliament to pass a 
measure which forbade any Nonconformist minister or teacher to teach in 
schools or to come within five miles of any corporate town or parliamentary 
borough where he had officiated, under penalties of fine and imprisonment, 
while substantial rewards were given to informers who revealed breaches of 
the law. As was always the case in England the excuse put forward was 
that Nonconformity was used as a cloak for sedition. 

Meanwhile Charles was leading the nation upon a course of foreign 
policy which he himself perfectly understood, though the nation did not. 
Charles wanted the personal friendship and support for himself of his cousin 
Louis XIV. ; and Louis had designs not for the formation of a Protestant 
League, but for establishing a French domination in Europe. The Haps- 
burg ascendency was to give place to that of the Bourbon. The price of 
Cromwell's alliance would have been that policy of toleration, if not of 
aggressive Protestantism, which had not been unacceptable to France while 
Oliver ruled in England. The price of Charles's alliance was not the pur- 
suit of an ideal; it could be calculated in terms of the currency. It was 
necessary, however, to persuade the people of England to believe that the 
alliance was in their interest, and to conceal from them the terms upon which 
it rested. It would not suit Louis to see England closely allied with either 
Holland or Spain, and, unlike Louis, neither Holland nor Spain would give 
Charles their alliance on the necessary terms. The renewal of the Naviga- 
tion Acts in a still stricter form repelled Holland, while Spain held out for 
the restitution of Dunkirk and Jamaica. But over and above alliance, Louis 
wanted from Charles merely the understanding that the king would do his 
best to reinstate Roman Catholicism, which Charles was quite ready to 
promise, while he asked in return the money which Louis did not grudge. 
Commercial rivalry weighed more than religious sentiment with popular 
opinion in England, so that it was easy to cultivate hostility towards the 
Dutch Republic, against which Charles himself bore grudges, not the least 
being the refusal of the dominant oligarchy to recognise the hereditary title 
to leadership in Charles's young nephew, William of Orange. All tradition 
also was opposed to alliance with Spain ; and Charles played into the hands 
of Louis by choosing for his bride a princess of the house of Braganza, a 
dynasty still insecurely seated on the throne of Portugal, of which Spain 
claimed the crown. ' 

The Portuguese marriage brought with the dowry of Catherine the 
possession of Bombay in India, and of Tangier on the coast of Africa ; 
and the acquisition of Tangier gave Charles an additional excuse not for 
restoring Dunkirk to Spain, but for selling it to France. The transaction 
was unpopular, but it was fully sanctioned by Monk (now Duke of Albe- 
marle) and the military authorities, who saw that its practical value could 



472 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

be maintained only at an intolerable expense, and that in fact Tangier and 
Dunkirk could not both be effectively occupied. 

Dutch and English were in a state of perpetual hostility on the high seas. 
The Dutch had planted in North America the colony of new Amsterdam, 
which formed a wedge between the Northern and Southern English colonies, 
while the English claimed that this territory was already theirs in right of 
earlier occupation. In the Indian Seas and in the Spice Islands the East 
India Companies of the two nations were perpetually at odds, and the strained 
relations, intensified by the Navigation Act, brought about the open declara- 
tion of war in 1665. 

As in the case of the early war between the Commonwealth and the Dutch, 
this war was signalised by mighty naval battles, in which both sides fought 
with desperate obstinacy, and hardly inflicted defeats alternated with hardly 
won victories, which left it almost impossible to say that either of the com- 
batants had the better of the other. Of these engagements the most famous 
were the first, a victory of the English led by the king's brother James, Duke 
of York, off Lowestoft, and the tremendous four days' battle of the Downs 
in the following year between Ruyter and Van Tromp on one side and 
Monk and Prince Rupert on the other, in which both sides claimed the 
victory, though the English losses were far heavier both in ships and in 
men. Yet six weeks after that great fight the Dutch were fairly defeated 
in another great battle. Nevertheless, between wanton wastage and real 
expenses the cost of the war was enormous. It came at the moment when 
London was devastated by the Plague, and the Plague was followed in 1666 
by the tremendous three days' fire, which made of old London a heap of 
charred ruins. By way of economising, the authorities elected to lay up a 
large portion of the fleet, with the result that the triumphant Dutch sailed 
up the Medway, and the thunder of their guns was heard by the revellers 
of King Charles's court. How conscious the Dutch were of the illusory 
character of their triumph and of the shame they had inflicted upon 
England was shown by the Treaty of Breda, which was actually in course 
of negotiation at the time and was ratified a few weeks later. Both sides 
retained what they had actually won, and New Amsterdam was converted 
into New York. 

Two other great consequences followed upon the war. The first was con- 
stitutional. Popular feeling had been wholly in favour of the war, and parlia- 
ment at the outset voted very large supplies. The indignation was all the 
greater when it became apparent that the money was being scandalously 
squandered. But hitherto, while parliament had voted or refused to vote the 
supplies called for by the king and his ministers, it had hardly attempted to 
claim control over the actual expenditure. Now it insisted that the supplies 
voted for the war should be expended on the war. The principle of the 
"appropriation of supply" was for the first time laid down ; that is, it was 
claimed that parliament could vote money for a particular object, and was 
entitled to see that that money should be spent upon that object and not 




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THE RESTORATION 473 

upon something else, a claim which involved parliamentary control over 
the national accounts. 

The second consequence was a personal one ; it led to the fall of 
Clarendon. He had been called to guide the affairs of state at a moment 
when the first necessity was the establishment of an equilibrium between 
parties still smarting and sore from the effects of a great civil war and a 
series of revolutionary governments, and of an equilibrium, between the 
Crown and the parliament when Crown and parliament each was seeking so 
to manipulate affairs as to procure its own ascendency. Partisanship would 
have won the minister a cheap popularity with one section or another of 
the opposing forces. Clarendon had given way to partisanship only on the 




A view of London at the time of the Great Fire- 1666. 
[From a print by Visscher.] 

Church question. By so doing he had alienated the Puritans, but had not 
won popularity with the Cavaliers, or at least the courtiers, because he at 
the same time assumed the attitude of a censor of court manners and morals. 
He opposed the parliamentary claim to appropriation of supplies as an inter- 
ference with the royal prerogative, and he opposed the claim put forward by 
Charles that the Crown could suspend the operation of the penal laws as 
unconstitutional. He was not responsible for the war or for its mismanage- 
ment, but popular opinion held him responsible for both. When the Dutch 
sailed up the Medway popular indignation demanded a scapegoat, and all 
parties found the most convenient scapegoat in Clarendon. He was 
threatened with impeachment, which he was prepared himself to face ; but 
Charles, who was afraid of awkward revelations, persuaded him to flee from 
the popular wrath to France. He was impeached and condemned in his 
absence. In his exile he wrote his stately, and in some respects invaluable, 



474 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

History of the Great Rebellion. The king was released from the hampering 
control of a mentor, who, however useful he might be on occasion, was 
exceedingly tiresome and uncomfortably exacting. 



Ill 
THE CABAL AND DANBY 

The executive government in the past had been in the hands of the 
Crown and the Privy Council. The character of the Restoration had made 
it necessary that both the old Roundheads and the Cavaliers should receive 
recognition from the king ; and the general effect was the admission to the 
Privy Council of so many members from both groups that the body itself 
became too unwieldy to conduct the business of the State. The real business 
passed into the hands of a small informal committee, which began to be 
known as the Cabinet or Cabal. The name of the Cabal has become 
permanently associated with the group who formed this inner council after 
the fall of Clarendon, popular attention having fastened on the fact that 
their initials — Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, Lauderdale — spell 
the word Cabal. 

Parliament had not formed into definite parties, and the ministers did not 
represent a party. They were the men with whom the king concocted his 
designs or pretended to do so, and through whom he carried them to execu- 
tion. Lauderdale managed Scotland. Ashley, who afterwards became Lord 
Shaftesbury, had sat in the Barebones Assembly. No man could have been 
less of a Puritan, nevertheless he associated himself politically with the 
Puritan antagonism to Clarendon and to Popery. Buckingham, the most 
profligate and resplendent member of a profligate and brilliant court, elected 
paradoxically enough to associate himself with the same political connec- 
tion. Clifford and Arlington, like the king's brother James, Duke of York, 
were either actually Catholics or ready to become so. It was perhaps almost 
the strongest desire of Charles himself to reinstate the Roman Catholic re- 
ligion and himself openly to join the Roman communion; to Louis XIV. he 
had probably already pledged himself to both these objects, though always 
with the proviso that he was not to be expected to sacrifice his crown for 
a Mass. The facts, if known to Clifford and Arlington, were carefully con- 
cealed from Ashley and Buckingham as well as from Lauderdale. 

Now it was no easy matter for Charles to carry out his private designs. 
The only theory on which the French alliance could be made to appeal 
strongly to the English people was that which regarded France as a Protestant 
Power for political purposes, a Power opposed to aggressive Catholicism, a 
Power which held Hapsburg aggression in check. This was the theory on 
which Cromwell had undoubtedly entered upon the alliance. Louis had not 
up to the present time displayed animosity to Protestantism. But it was 
already clear that the French king had embarked on a policy of French 







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475 



476 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

aggrandisement which was a menace not only to the Hapsburgs but to 
Europe at large. To Holland for a century past Spain had been the enemy, 
but Holland was just becoming aware that Spain was no longer capable of 
endangering her liberties. The Spanish Netherlands lay as a buffer between 
France and Holland ; Louis coveted them, and if they passed from Spain to 
France, Holland would be in much more danger from her powerful neighbour 
than from distant Spain. Again, although Louis was by no means on good 
terms with the Papacy, it was being realised in some quarters that the centre 
of aggressive Catholicism was not the Papal Curia, but the Jesuit order. In 
fact the Papacy and the Hapsburgs, Austrian and Spanish, had completely 
departed from the ancient attitude of Philip II. and the Popes of Elizabeth's 
time. But the Jesuits had not departed from that attitude, and the Jesuits, 
now in disagreement with the Papal authority, were dominant in France. 
The time was coming, though it had not yet come, when Catholic and 
Protestant Powers would have to unite against the aggression of France, 
revealed as the open enemy of toleration. The position was not as yet 
generally grasped in England; but England was uneasy and restive on 
political more than on religious grounds. Louis had recently put forward a 
claim to provinces of the Spanish Netherlands on behalf of his wife, who 
was the elder sister of the infant King of Spain, the basis of the claim being 
certain local customs of succession which could not in the eyes of any one 
except Louis apply to the sovereignty. England was feeling extremely 
suspicious of Louis's ambitions. 

Hence Charles found himself constrained to give open assent to the 
formation, through the diplomatic agency of Sir William Temple, of the 
Triple Alliance between England, Holland, and Sweden, with the ostensible 
object of inducing France and Spain to come to terms. That object was 
accomplished, since Louis was not at this stage prepared to defy such a 
coalition. But Charles had been careful to explain privately to his cousin 
that he was not a free agent in the matter. The Triple Alliance must be 
looked upon merely as a temporary check. The two kings entered on a 
course of secret negotiations which resulted in the most shameful compact 
in our annals. By the secret Treaty of Dover, of which the true details 
remained unknown until revealed by modern research, Charles undertook to 
join Louis in a war against Holland. In return for his alliance Charles was 
to receive substantial subsidies from the French king. This portion of the 
compact was confirmed by a treaty made in the following year to which all 
the members of the Cabal were privy ; but the iniquity of the secret treaty 
lay in clauses which were concealed from Ashley and Buckingham. Charles 
pledged himself to reinstate the Roman Catholic religion and himself to join 
the Roman communion, as his brother James had already done, as well as 
Clifford. And the price of this pledge was the promise of a substantial 
pension, a sum down when the king's conversion should be publicly 
announced, and a guarantee that Charles should be supported by French 
troops if his subjects revolted. 



THE RESTORATION 477 

Charles himself and all the members of the Cabal were advocates of 
toleration, though for different reasons. For the principle of toleration 
Charles cared nothing; he had no sympathy with Puritanism or the 
Puritans. But he and Clifford and Arlington were shrewd enough to 
perceive that it was hardly possible to seek for a relaxation of the laws 
against Roman Catholics without also relaxing those against Protestant 
dissent. Ashley and Buckingham, on the other hand, were allied to the 
dissenters. But the Cavalier parliament was hotly intolerant alike of 
Romanism and of Nonconformist Puritanism. Buckingham and, what 
was infinitely more important, Ashley were both duped by Charles, and, 
knowing nothing of the secret treaty, favoured the French alliance against 
the Dutch ; relying upon the commercial advantages which would accrue 
and upon the sentiment of hostility to Holland, the desire to avenge the 
disgrace of the Medway affair, to make a Dutch war popular. To keep the 
hands of the government free parliament was prorogued from 1670 to 
1673. In the interval the sham second treaty with France was negotiated ; 
Charles, instigated by Ashley, who was made Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord 
Chancellor, issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the operation of 
the penal laws ; and in 1672 war was declared in conjunction with France 
against Holland. "No clap of thunder on a fair frosty day could more 
astonish the world," wrote Temple in his memoirs. 

The approach of war at a moment when it would have been dangerous 
to meet parliament drove the Cabal to a dangerous expedient. Government 
had, according to custom, obtained a temporary loan from the goldsmiths 
of about a million and a half, which was to be paid back when the taxes for 
the year were collected. The money in the treasury and the taxes for its 
repayment were now attached for the purposes of the war. The money 
which the goldsmiths had lent was to a great extent money which had been 
deposited with them by merchants. This "Stop of the Exchequer," as 
it was called, deprived them of the means of repaying the deposits, and 
widespread financial ruin resulted. 

The war itself went ill. The Dutch, fighting single-handed and 
threatened with utter destruction by the combined attack of France and 
England, this time proved themselves a match for the united forces of their 
enemies on the sea ; and when they were in danger of being overwhelmed 
by land fell back on their last defence — opened the dykes, and laid the 
country under water*. A revolution swept away the oligarchy which con- 
trolled the State, and set at its head young William of Orange, who thus 
began his career as the implacable foe of Louis XIV. ; but this same change 
also changed the attitude of Charles towards the Dutch Republic. William, 
the grandson of Charles I., stood next in succession to the English throne 
after the king's brother James and his daughters, for Charles's wife, Catherine 
. of Braganza, had borne him no children. Charles hated the Dutch olig- 
archy ; but a Holland dominated by William of Orange was another matter. 
In 1674 articles of peace were signed between Holland and England. 



478 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

There were other reasons, too, which led to this result. In 1673 it had 
become no longer possible to repeat the prorogation of parliament, and 
parliament met in resentful mood. The royal prerogative had been asserted 
in a manner not to its liking. Clarendon of old had checked Charles's first 
attempt to exercise the dispensing power and to relieve individuals from 
religious penalties and disabilities. Now members returned, indignant, to 
find Roman Catholics in high favour. Very decisively parliament dispelled 
any illusions that may have existed in Charles's mind with regard to their 
hostility to Romanism by passing the Test Act, which required all persons 

holding public office to receive 
the Sacrament according to the 
Anglican rite and expressly to 
deny the Roman doctrine of 
Transubstantiation. The most 
intolerantly Anglican of parlia- 
ments was as bitterly Anti- 
Romanist as if it had been com- 
posed of Presbyterians. Even 
the Protestant dissenters made it 
obvious that they would rather 
submit to Corporation Acts and 
Five Mile Acts themselves than 
be relieved at the price of tolera- 
tion for Papists. From that 
moment Charles, however re- 
luctantly, entirely abandoned his 
design of reinstating Romanism, 
and the Declaration of Indul- 
gence was formally withdrawn. 
Louis may have recognised that circumstances were too strong for his 
cousin, but he realised at the same time that the purposes of the secret 
treaty were for the time being out of reach ; he could not gravely resent 
the withdrawal of England from the Dutch War. 

But the Test Act and the Peace of Westminster were not the only results 
of the reassembling of Parliament. The Test Act itself excluded from office 
the Duke of York and Clifford with other Roman Catholics. Shaftesbury, 
more than suspicious that the king had tricked him, went into opposition 
along with Buckingham. The Cabal was dissolved, and Charles called to 
his counsels the High Anglican and Cavalier, Sir Thomas Osborne, who was 
made Earl of Danby and Lord Treasurer. 

From the Danby Administration may be dated the beginnings of the 
division of parliament into two organised parties, though they cannot as yet 
be defined as Ministerialists and Opposition, because some time was still to 
elapse before it became a matter of course that all the ministers of the 
Crown should be chosen from the one party. But although the principle of 




An English ship of war, temp. Charles II. 
[From a medal.] 



THE RESTORATION 479 

forming a united ministry, with its corollary of collective responsibility, had 
not yet come into play, during the rest of the reign of Charles II. parliament 
was shaping itself into the two divisions which became known as the Court 
Party and the Country Party, and ultimately as Tories and Whigs. Now 
also was inaugurated that extensive system of party management, by the 
distribution of places and emoluments and still more flagrant forms of 
bribery, which so corrupted parliament during the ensuing century. 

Charles chose Danby as the champion of Anglicanism and Royal 
Prerogative in spite of the fact that the minister was exceedingly hostile to 
France. For the time being it suited Charles very well to make a show of 
independence of Louis. He intended to make his bargain with the French 
king, but he could get improved terms, even at the cost of a temporary 
estrangement, though the estrangement must not go too far. 

Shaftesbury was determining upon his line of policy, of which the primary 
aim was to be the exclusion of the Roman Catholic Duke of York from the 
succession to the throne, while the immediate design was to procure a dis- 
solution in the expectation that a new parliament would set the country 
party decisively in the ascendant and compel the dismissal of Danby. But, 
when parliament met after an extended prorogation, Shaftesbury and 
Buckingham over-reached themselves in their opposition and were relegated 
to the Tower. 

By this time Charles was in fact fencing with Louis. Danby was allowed 
to push forward his anti-French policy. The Piincess Mary, the Protestant 
daughter of the Duke of York, and heir-presumptive to the throne if she 
should outlive her father, was married to William of Orange, Holland being 
still at war with France ; and Danby joyfully believed that England would 
now be carried into the war on the side of Holland. But Danby was to be 
disappointed. Through the first half of 1678 elaborate intrigues were going 
on. Louis wanted to bring his Dutch war to an end. He was in com- 
munication with sundry leaders of the Opposition in England, who, while 
they could not risk the unpopularity of openly opposing a French war, were 
bent on the overthrow of Danby, who was conspicuously identified with the 
war policy. On the other hand, Charles merely wanted to use the threat 
of war in order to extract better terms for himself from the French king. By 
Charles's orders and very much against his own will Danby was compelled 
to write to the English ambassador at Paris offering English aid in bringing 
the war to a close for a substantial cash consideration. A secret treaty was 
ultimately framed, under which Charles was to get his money and was to 
disband the troops then being raised for the war, conditions which gave to 
Charles what he most wanted and to the Opposition leaders what they most 
wanted, while Louis made his terms with the Dutch without English inter- 
vention. But the letter which Danby had written was presently to be 
employed as an instrument in procuring his fall. 



4 8o 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



IV 




THE POPISH PLOT AND THE EXCLUSION BILLS 

So far the country party had been baffled. They had been unable to 
obtain either the overthrow of Danby or the dissolution of the parliament 
which had been sitting for seventeen years. Although the Triennial Act of 
the Long Parliament was in force, requiring that the Houses should meet 
at least every three years, there was no statutory provision limiting the time 
during which a parliament once summoned might remain undissolved. Nor 

were the Opposition now (1678) provided with any 
really effective cry for attacking the Government. 
Failing aid from the High Gods, they moved the 
Powers of Acheron, or the Powers of Acheron 
moved on their behalf. Charles learnt that the 
ordinarily sober English people were capable of 
going perfectly mad on one subject, and that 
subject was Popery. With singular opportune- 
ness for Shaftesbury, the No Popery frenzy 
laid sudden grip upon the nation. Titus Oates 
invented, and, having invented, revealed the popish 
plot. 

Oates was an unspeakable knave who, being the 
son of a Baptist minister, had himself disgraced the 
Anglican Church by taking Orders, and had then 
joined the Church of Rome. Among the Jesuits he had gleaned enough to 
suggest to him the fabrication of a portentous and elaborate lie, having in it 
a leaven of truth, just sufficient to save it from immediate detection. The 
Jesuits had given up hope of the conversion of England by Charles, and 
were fondly anticipating the accession to the throne of his brother James, 
who had long been an avowed member of the Roman Church. Incidentally, 
Oates ascertained that a Jesuit meeting had been held on April 24. Oates 
proceeded to lay information before the king of the Jesuit plot for his murder. 
The city of London was to be provided with another great fire, Ireland was 
to be roused to insurrection, French troops were to come over, and there 
was to be a general massacre of Protestants. A copy of this declaration 
was lodged by the informers with a magistrate of the highest character, Sir 
Edmund Berry Godfrey. Oates was summoned before the Council, and 
stuck to his statements, though the king at least was perfectly satisfied that 
he was lying. Private papers were seized which implicated Father Coleman, 
who was officially the secretary of the Duke of York's wife, in what was 
certainly treasonable if futile plotting. The papers confirmed some of Oates's 
statements and were consequently regarded as proving his veracity. 

In the wild panic which ensued, every lie produced by every informer was 



" Dr. Oates discovereth the plot 

to ye King and Council." 
[From a 17th century playing card.] 




THE RESTORATION 481 

swallowed with avidity. Godfrey was found murdered in a ditch, and though 
nothing was ever provejd, the frenzied public assumed that he had been 
murdered by the Jesuits. Catholics and suspected Catholics were swept into 
prison and condemned to death after a mockery of trial. Nobody dared 
to raise hand or voice in an attempt to check the popular rage. A bill was 
carried and received the royal assent for the exclusion of Catholics from the 
House of Peers, the Duke of York alone being excepted by a bare majority 
of two votes. A direct attack on the succession of James was only evaded 
by the king's assurance that he would accept restrictions of the prerogative 
for a successor who was not a Protestant — for which James never forgave 
Danby. Then in order that the king might marry again a wife who might 
bear him a son and so shut James out of the succession, Oates brought a 
charge against the unlucky queen and her physician 
of attempting to poison Charles, which was probably 
instigated by Shaftesbury. But Charles drew the 
line at this monstrous accusation against the wife 
whom he so shamelessly wronged. The charge 
against her was dropped, and the Chief-Justice, with 
the help of a conscientious and valiant jury, acquitted 
the accused physician. 

The attack on James's succession had failed, and 
Danby was not even shaken ; but at this stage the 
vindictiveness of the French king came into play. 
Danby's letter, before referred to, was produced and 
read in the House of Commons. The secret bargaining with France was 
revealed. It was of no avail that the letter had been written by the king's 
order, as attested by his own hand- writing. The doctrine of ministerial 
responsibility was definitely laid down. The king could do no wrong, but 
the minister who did wrong in his name could not shelter himself from 
punishment behind the king's authority. Danby was impeached. 

For eighteen years the king had abstained from dissolving the Cavalier 
Parliament, although it had never been subservient to the royal authority, 
and had been increasingly insistent on its own ; Charles had always been 
shrewd enough to perceive that a new parliament would probably be more, 
not less, hostile. But the only chance of saving Danby now was that a 
new parliament might after all be more amenable. The Cavalier parliament 
was dissolved. 

The new parliament was not more amenable. Shaftesbury had a large 
majority in the Commons, and Danby was again impeached. Thereupon he 
produced a royal pardon which stayed the proceedings ; but the threat of a 
Bill of Attainder drove Charles to dismiss him from office, and to lodge him 
in the Tower lest worse should befall. At the suggestion of Sir William 
Temple an academic device was adopted to avoid a deadlock. The king 
dismissed the whole of his Privy Council and appointed a new Council of 
thirty members, fifteen being officers of State, while the other fifteen were 

2 H 



Contemporary Medal of the 
Godfrey murder. 



482 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

non-official. A preponderance was given to Shaftesbury and his followers ; 
but for practical purposes the new scheme was still-born. The king still ruled 
through ministers of his own selection. On the other hand, a new Exclusion 
Bill was introduced and passed by the House of Commons ; James was de- 
clared incapable of succeeding to the Crown, which, in the event of the king 
dying without male issue, was to pass to the nearest Protestant heir. Charles 
was determined not to allow the exclusion of his brother, and he prorogued 
the parliament, but not till it had passed, almost if not quite by accident, the 
Habeas Corpus Act. In principle there was nothing new in the measure. 
Theoretically an accused person could procure a writ of Habeas Corpus 

THE SUCCESSION AFTER CHARLES II. 

James I. and VI. , 1603. 



Charles I. , 

1625, 
m. Henrietta 

Maria. 



Charles II. , 
1660. 



James II. and 
VII., 1685, 



Mary, 

m. William II. 

of Orange. 



Henrietta, 

m. Philip of 

Orleans. 



(1) Anne 
Hyde. 



(2) Mary of 
Modena. 



Elizabeth, 

m. Frederick, 

Elector 

Palatine. 



Mary, m. 

William III. 

of Orange, 

1689. 



Anne, 

m. George of 

Denmark, 

1702. 



James Edward. 

I 
Charles 
Edward. 



William III. 

of Orange, 

m. Mary of 

England, 1689. 



I 

Anna Maria, 

in. Victor 

Amadeus of 

Savoy. 



Charles Louis. 



Rupert, 
o 



Maurice. 
O 



Elizabeth, 

m. Philip of 

Orleans. 



Charles, 
Elector 
Palatine. 



Sophia, 

m. Elector of 

Hanover. 

I 

George I. , 

1714. 



which required that he be either brought up for trial or set at liberty. But 
the lawyers had discovered devices enough by which the issuing of the writs 
could be deferred almost indefinitely,, The new Act required that trial or 
release should take place within a definite time after application for the 
writ. There is good reason for believing Burnet's story that the majority of 
nine which passed the bill in the House of Lords was really a minority, the 
tellers by way of a jest having counted one particularly fat lord as ten. 

But the Opposition were already divided. Shaftesbury, bent on the 
exclusion of James, had determined to fix the succession on the Duke of 
Monmouth, an illegitimate son of the king, who enjoyed high favour with 
his father and general popularity in the country. The great difficulty in the 
way was that Charles himself could not be induced to say that Monmouth's 



THE RESTORATION - 483 

mother had actually been his lawful wife. Another section, headed by Halifax 
and Sunderland, objected to the Monmouth candidature, and sought rather to 
impose close restrictions on the royal power if enjoyed by Roman Catholics. 
The ultimate succession was by their plan retained for the Duke's daughter 
Mary and her husband William of Orange. The Halifax group had enraged 
Shaftesbury by supporting the prorogation ; they now urged the king to a 
dissolution, and the king acted on their advice. Fortune had just favoured 
Charles by giving him a new lease of popularity. He was seized with an 
illness so severe that his life was despaired of, and the country suddenly 
realised that there was every prospect that his death would plunge it into 
civil war over the succession question. Charles, however, recovered. 

A new parliament met in October, only to be immediately prorogued to 
the following January (1680), and then prorogued again. The prorogations 
broke up the Halifax group. Petitions poured in, demanding that the Houses 
should be assembled, and were met by counter-resolutions from the king's 
supporters, whence for a time the two parties were known as the Peti- 
tioners and Abhorrers, since the counter-resolutions expressed "abhorrence" 
of the petitions. But in the course of the year these nicknames were 
finally displaced by the appellations of "Whig" and Tory/' the names 
commonly applied to Scottish Covenanters and Irish brigands. When the 
parliament did at last meet in October, an Exclusion Bill was once more 
passed by the House of Commons, but the debating skill of Halifax procured 
its defeat in the Lords. The Commons were furious, turned upon Halifax, 
and threatened to refuse supplies unless their demands were satisfied. 

The calculating coolness with which the king faced the crisis cannot 
but command admiration. The belief was general that his refusal would 
bring about civil war ; but Charles rightly judged that Shaftesbury was not 
the man to play the part of Pym and Hampden, however furiously he 
might threaten. Moreover, in the last resort, the king had what his father 
had never possessed, and what the Whigs did not possess now, a standing 
army. There were the household troops in England and a large force in 
Scotland, besides the troops which held Tangier. He did not give way, but 
dissolved parliament, and summoned a new one to meet at Oxford in 
March 1681. 

Charles had tried to counteract popular hostility by an appearance of 
antagonism to France. It was now apparent that he could not win upon 
those lines. The moment had come for a final bargain with Louis. The 
bargain was made. Louis would give him an adequate pension if he ruled 
without parliament at all, and lent himself to the French king's policy. 

It was of set purpose that Charles had selected Oxford instead of London 
as the gathering place of the parliament. No parliament sitting at West- 
minster could escape the consciousness of pressure from the force of public 
opinion in London. Shaftesbury had systematically organised the City ; a 
hint from him might easily raise a riot of a very dangerous kind. Oxford 
was safe. The undergraduates were not in residence, and the atmosphere of 



484 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the place was extremely royalist. The colleges were filled with the members 
of the two Houses, and the town swarmed with their retainers, flaunting the 
Whig and Tory colours. The Houses were met with a final proposal for a 
compromise. The king would not assent to any deviation from the legiti- 
mate rule of hereditary succession, but he would consider anything short 
of exclusion. A definite scheme was submitted which probably originated 
with Halifax. James was to become king of England if he survived his 
brother, but his kingship was to be merely nominal. He himself was to be 
banished from the country, and the royal functions were to be discharged 
by a regent. That regent was to be his elder daughter Mary, and, failing 
Mary, his younger daughter Anne. The two princesses, it must be noted, 
were the daughters of James's first wife, Anne Hyde, Clarendon's daughter, 
and both adhered to the Anglican form of religion in which they had been 
brought up. If the Duke's second wife, the Roman Catholic Mary of 
Modena, should bear him a son, and that son w T ere brought up as a Protes- 
tant, the regency would cease when he came of age. 

Charles knew perfectly well that Shaftesbury and his following would not 
accept that compromise ; had it not been so he would probably not have 
made the offer. Shaftesbury imagined it to be a last desperate attempt to 
save the situation ; if Charles would agree to those terms it could only be 
because he felt himself beaten. Shaftesbury had his own offer ; let the 
king put an end to the discord by acknowledging Monmouth. The king 
refused to acknowledge Monmouth ; the Commons refused to adopt the 
regency scheme. Once more Shaftesbury brought in the Exclusion Bill. 
Charles, urbane as usual, interested himself in the arrangements for finding 
the Commons better accommodation for their debates in the Sheldonian 
Theatre, in place of the cramped chamber which they now occupied. Only 
the inner ring of the king's advisers had a suspicion of his intentions. 

On the Monday morning the Lords assembled at their meeting place 
in the Geometry Schools. Thither the king betook himself privately, his 
state robes being conveyed in a separate sedan chair. All suspicions had 
been lulled. The Whigs had no fear of Louis ; he had kept his own counsel, 
and his money was jingling in not a few of their pockets. A summons came 
to the Commons to attend at the bar of the House of Lords ; they came in 
gleeful anticipation that Charles was about to announce his surrender. They 
knew nothing of those robes of state which had been carried so secretly to 
the Geometry School, the robes he must wear in pronouncing the dissolution 
of parliament, the robes he was wearing when they entered the chamber. 
The king spoke ; the thunderbolt fell. When he ceased speaking there was 
no longer a parliament. And no other parliament was called until his suc- 
cessor was on the throne. Charles had sold himself to the French king, 
and it mattered nothing to him that the constitutional source of supply was 
closed. The sword upon which the House of Commons had relied was 
snapped at the hilt. Shaftesbury saw that the game was lost. The king 
would not have dared to act as he had done without the certainty that he 



THE RESTORATION 485 

held the winning cards. To attempt an armed rebellion would have been 
madness. In impotent rage and fear the discomfited Whigs scattered to 
their homes. 

V 
SCOTLAND 

For Scotland the era of the Restoration was a period of storm and stress. 
In that country the return of Charles II. was to the full as popular as in 
England. The country in general had remained loyal to the theory of a 
monarchy, and clung to the royal house which had inherited the English 
Crown, although the sentiment of loyalty was combined with a deep-rooted 
insistence on the national religion. Republicanism 
and incorporation with the Commonwealth had 
inevitably been accepted after the battle of Wor- 
cester ; but the return of the Stuart king and in- 
dependence of England were generally welcomed 
except by the extreme, section ^of Covenanters, who 
were to be found for the most part in the western 
Lowlands. 

But Scotland had to pay a heavy price for the 
restoratioh of the monarchy and of national in- 
dependence. She at once lost the commercial ad- Archibald S| y b 1 f ' Marquis 
vantages of the Union. Her shipping had enjoyed [From the portrait t y George 
all the advantages of the Commonwealth Naviga- jam.sone.] 

tion Act ; and of these she was at once deprived by the Navigation Act of 
the Convention Parliament in England, which confined the carrying trade to 
English bottoms. Moreover, while in England the Restoration ostensibly 
established a constitutional government under parliamentary control, in 
Scotland it in effect established despotism. Further, while the old despotism 
had been checked under Charles I. by the alienation of the magnates from 
the Crown and their consequent alliance with the Kirk, the Kirk had now 
alienated the magnates, who had gone over to the Crown. Even the very 
large body among the clergy, of moderates who were known as Resolutioners, 
failed to make their influence practically felt with the Government. 

There were few actual victims of the Restoration. Argyle was naturally 
singled out for vindictive treatment ; his execution was legally inexcusable, 
though it was not difficult to regard it in the light of a just retribution for 
the death of Montrose. By the disappearance of Argyle the old Covenanters 
were left without a leader among the lay magnates. After a short but sharp 
rivalry between the thorough-going Cavalier Middleton and the ex-Cove- 
. nanter Lauderdale, the former was defeated, and Lauderdale secured the 
virtual control of the Scottish government, which he retained for nearly 
twenty years. 




486 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Like the English Puritans, the Scottish Covenanters had used their power 
too aggressively ; in high places the reaction was complete. The clergy for 
the most part held to their principles, though some, like James Sharp, made 
haste to agree with the enemy while they were in the way with him. Sharp 
had been sent to London in the interests of Presbyterianism ; he returned to 
Scotland a convert to Episcopalianism. The parliament which met in 1661 
was, after the manner of Scottish parliaments, an instrument which worked 
the will of the effective government, and the effective government consisted 
of the king's ministers and Privy Council. They wiped out all legislation 
subsequent to the bishops' wars, and left the religious settlement to the Crown. 
The Crown, which at the moment meant Middleton rather than Lauderdale, 
restored Episcopacy, and Sharp was made Archbishop of St. Andrews. 
Office-holders were required to denounce the Covenant and to affirm the 
doctrine of non-resistance. Broadly speaking the constitution of Church and 
State stood where they had stood thirty years before, but in both the power 
of the Crown was less assailable than it had been at the earlier date. 

Against this system there was no national uprising like that which had 
produced the bishops' war. But in Scotland, as in England, the ecclesiastical 
settlement drove a large number of ministers to resign their livings for con- 
science* sake ; though the liturgy was not enforced, the principle at stake was 
the one always dominant in Scottish ecclesiastical politics, spiritual independ- 
ence. In the south-west the Covenanting spirit was roused to a stubborn 
defiance, whilst the laws against Nonconformity were enforced by the 
government even more rigorously than the Clarendon Code was applied by 
Cavalier magistrates in England. 

The hostility of the Galloway Covenanters, already displayed by the pro- 
cess of "rabbling " ministers who had taken the places of those who had given 
up their manses, came to a head in the Pentland rising at the end of 1666. 
Following on a scuffle with the soldiery engaged in breaking up conventicles, 
a band of insurgents assembled in arms. Thomas Dalziel, a brutal veteran 
whose service in Russia had taught him an exceptional savagery, was placed 
in command of the government troops. The insurgents marched to 
Edinburgh under the delusion that the capital would side with them. They 
had hardly discovered their mistake when they were caught and routed by 
Dalziel at the fight of Rullion Green. 

The Pentland rising was followed by a sharp persecution directed against 
those who were supposed to have fostered the rebellion. Torture — the boot 
and the thumbscrew — was freely used, though with little success, as a means 
of extracting information, and some scores of offenders were put to death. 
These things had taken place in the absence of Lauderdale. He had person- 
ally taken the line of rather discouraging persecution, and allowing the 
odium of that policy to be borne by his colleague and rival Lord Rothes and 
Archbishop Sharp. The practical outcome was that Lauderdale now became 
supreme. He at once procured from a subservient parliament an Act de- 
finitely establishing the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, a measure 



THE RESTORATION 487 

little to the liking of the bishops, and still more objectionable to the Presby- 
terians with their doctrine of spiritual independence. But the Act also 
affirmed that the entire administrative control was a prerogative of the 
Crown ; and with this instrument in his hands Lauderdale set himself to 
a still harsher penal legislation enforced by an increasing standing army 
virtually controlled by himself. Disaffection developed along with the 
severity of the government, especially when it was demanded that the land- 
holders should bind themselves, together with their families, servants, and 
tenants, not to attend conventicles or to harbour unlicensed preachers. To 
suppress the disaffection an army of ten thousand men, mainly from the 
Highlands, was quartered upon the disturbed districts, where the " High- 
land host" treated the population very much as conquering troops were 
wont to treat a hostile country in seventeenth-century warfare. 

The results were such as might have been expected. A party of desper- 
adoes were lying in wait for an informer on Magus Muir near St. Andrews 
when accident threw Archbishop Sharp into their hands. They murdered 
him before the eyes of his daughter. Four weeks later a sympathising band 
of Covenanters routed at Drumclog a party of soldiers under the command 
of James Graham of Claverhouse, who had been actively employed by the 
government in the suppression of conventicles and the dispersal of open-air 
gatherings. 

There was no organised rebellion. The victors of Drumclog were for the 
most part zealots, of whom a large proportion applauded the murder of Sharp, 
while probably every one of them would have sheltered the murderers as a 
matter of course. But there would have been no rebellion at all, organised or 
otherwise, if the population had not been goaded by the tyrannical harshness 
of the law and the brutalities of the troops in government employ. The 
command in Scotland was placed in the hands of the Duke of Monmouth, 
whose role it was to seek popularity. Three weeks after Drumclog the 
insurgents were dispersed at the battle of Bothwell Brig, where four hundred 
of them were killed and more than a thousand prisoners were taken. Very 
few of them were put to death, but most of them were kept through the 
winter in wooden sheds in the Grey friars' Churchyard, where they suffered 
very severely. Then the majority were allowed to go home on pledging 
themselves to keep the peace, though some were obstinate enough to refuse 
the promise. 

Monmouth got general credit for his leniency ; but immediately after- 
wards he was removed from his office, and his place was taken by the Duke 
of York. Practically at this stage (1680) James became the governor of 
Scotland instead of Lauderdale, with Dalziel in command of the troops. A 
steady persecution set in which found its warrant in the action of the ex- 
treme leaders of the Covenanters, Cargill and Cameron, from whom the 
-zealots soon came to be known as " Cameronians." This section issued the 
Declaration of Sanquhar, in which all allegiance to Charles Stuart was 
renounced. 



488 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The Cameronians in fact elected to declare themselves rebels, and as 
such the government treated them. A rational leniency would in all prob- 
ability have resulted in effective pacification ; but the government chose 
to enforce the law with the utmost rigour, while the rebels openly declared 
their own intention of retaliation. The persecution of the Covenanters 
throughout the ensuing years is a very ugly chapter of history, luridly de- 
picted thirty years afterwards in the narratives of Wodrow and Walker. But 
even here the theory of the government was that the victims were avowed 
rebels ; and deeply as the name of Graham of Claverhouse has been exe- 
crated, no instance has ever been brought home to him in which he exceeded 
the positive instructions under which he was acting, or executed any one who 
had not refused to abjure the declaration against allegiance. The suppression 
of conventicles was monstrous ; the subjection of obviously harmless persons 
to the death penalty was monstrous ; but the blame lies on the shoulders of 
the government, and to some extent on the zealots themselves, rather than 
on the officers who carried out their orders. 



VI 

THE VICTORY OF THE CROWN 

The rout of the Whigs, when the Oxford parliament was dissolved, was 
complete. The acute Charles, who, when he gave his mind to business, prob- 
ably had a keener insight than any man in England, had realised that 
Shaftesbury was ruining his own cause by claiming too much. In that 
course Charles deliberately encouraged him by his professed readiness to 
make such concessions as had been offered at the last parliament. The 
adoption of the Monmouth candidature was a fatal error, since, despite the 
Duke's popularity, the world at large did not seriously believe that he was 
legitimate, and the country could not be united upon a proposal to set a 
bastard on the throne. Moreover, Charles realised that a reaction against 
the popish terror was already setting in. Men were awaking with shame to 
the consciousness that they had completely lost their heads and had been 
guilty of flagrant and unreasoning injustice ; and they were angry with the 
men who had encouraged the panic. Popular opinion had swung round, 
and the discomfiture of Shaftesbury's party, with its strong majority in the 
House of Commons, aroused no indignation. 

Had the country known either of the old Treaty of Dover or of the latest 
agreement between Charles and Louis, matters would have gone very differ- 
ently ; but there were not half-a-dozen men in the country who were in 
either of those secrets. Charles had indeed a difficult task in keeping faith 
with France without arousing suspicions ; but it was one to which his con- 
summate powers of deception were quite equal. He could prove to his 
Dutch nephew that he could not join a league against Louis without appeal- 
ing to parliament, and he could not appeal to parliament without having to 



THE RESTORATION 489 

face either a new Exclusion bill or at best a bill which would seriously limit 
his successor's prerogative ; and neither of those alternatives was at all to 
the taste of James's son-in-law and prospective heir. At home the safe 
policy was to revive the sentiment of Anglican royalism which had been so 
active in the early years of the reign, and to avoid injudicious movements in 
the direction of toleration either of Puritan dissenters or Romanists. 

Still it was necessary for Charles to obtain further securities for the royal 
power. A time might come when, in spite of his present comfortable rela- 
tions with Louis, he might be obliged to face the parliament; and in the 
meanwhile his control over the Courts of Justice was not such as he desired. 
The judges might be as subservient as those of his father, but his father's 
arbitrary Courts had been abolished, and juries might, and did, prove inde- 
pendent. When Shaftesbury was charged with treason a London Grand 
Jury threw out the bill in defiance of the directions they received from the 
judge. Whiggery was inconveniently prevalent in the boroughs ; the cor- 
porations would be only too likely to return Whig members to a parliament 
if summoned, and the corporation officers would empanel juries disagreeably 
imbued with Whig traditions. 

But all this could be remedied. When the government procured the ap- 
pointment of Tory sheriffs for the city, Tory juries were secure, and Shaftes- 
bury promptly removed himself out of danger to Holland. What Charles 
required was to obtain control of the corporations. Writs of Quo Warranto 
were issued to inquire into the authority by which the corporations, begin- 
ing with the City of London, exercised their powers and privileges. It was 
not difficult to show that the actual powers conveyed by the charters had 
been transgressed, and charter after charter was forfeited or surrendered ; 
to be restored, with this vital change, that the corporation officers were ap- 
pointed either by direct nomination of the Crown or subject to the Crown's 
control instead of by free election of the burgesses. 

While the boroughs were being robbed of their independence and were 
in effect being transformed into instruments of despotism, Whig mismanage- 
ment was playing into the king's hands. The clear policy for the party to 
follow was to drop Monmouth, ally itself with William and Mary, and trust 
to the indescretion of Louis XIV. or of the Duke of York to provide it with 
the certain means of exciting public opinion once more against the succession 
of James and association with France. Even before the flight of Shaftesbury, 
which was shortly followed by his death, the Whig leaders were taking the 
opposite course of encouraging Monmouth to court popular favour. The 
real ruin was wrought, however, not by the leaders, but by the irresponsible 
hot-heads who in 1683 concocted the Rye House Plot. Charles and James 
were to be seized and perhaps to be assassinated on their way from New- 
market to London. The plot was betrayed, and although it had been care- 
iully concealed from the Whig leaders, several of them were charged with 
complicity. 

The Earl of Essex committed suicide in the Tower. Enough evidence 



490 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of Russell's association with some of the plotters was found to warrant his 
condemnation by a partisan court. The great scandal was in connection 
with the doom of Algernon Sidney, against whom only one witness could be 
produced, though the law of treason required two. But among his papers 
was found an essay in favour of republicanism. It had not even been 
published, but it was admitted as the equivalent for the necessary second 
witness. Sidney was condemned and executed. The subsequent indignation 
at this travesty of justice was for the time being suppressed by the present 
indignation at an assassination plot. 

The Court became more popular than it had been at any period of the 
reign ; repeated breaches of the Test Act and Corporation Acts were allowed 
to pass unchallenged ; high Anglican doctrines of non-resistance to the royal 
authority predominated on all sides, and Tory magistrates applied the 
persecuting Acts against dissenters with renewed energy. In the spring of 
1684 Charles felt himself strong enough to refuse to summon a parliament, 
in defiance of the Triennial Act, and even although the boroughs were now 
so completely in his hands that he would have been sure of a subservient 
House of Commons. Danby and certain Roman Catholic lords who had 
been confined in the Tower at the time of the Popish plot were set at liberty, 
although they had hitherto been detained on the ground that they had been 
committed to prison by parliament, and that only the authority of parliament 
could release them. In defiance of the Test Act, James was restored to 
his old office at the head of the Admiralty. In the general paralysis it 
mattered little that the voice of England was silent on continental affairs, 
and that Tangier was finally abandoned. 

Charles had won the game ; but no time was given to him to follow up his 
victory. In February 1685 he was seized with apoplexy. On his deathbed 
he received the last Sacraments as a member of the Church of Rome. 
Monmouth was out of the country, and James II. succeeded to the crown 
unchallenged. The "merry monarch" preserved to the last his reputation 
with the nation as a good-natured faineant 

"Who never said a foolish thing 
And never did a wise one — " 

a popular reputation which survived for a century and a half, an unparalleled 
example of triumphant dissimulation. 



CHAPTER XIX 

NEMESIS 
I 



QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE— . 

The position created by the accession of James II. was decidedly paradoxical. 
England, Ireland, and Scotland were officially Protestant States, in which 
Roman Catholics were not only 
barred by the law from holding 
any public office, whether in 
the service of the State or of the 
municipality, but were further 
penalised for participating in 
their own religious rites, and 
for abstaining from participa- 
tion in the rites of a Church 
which they accounted heretical. 
Yet at the head of these Pro- 
testant States was a zealous 
Roman Catholic, who, long after 
reaching maturity, had deliber- 
ately chosen to separate him- 
self from the official established {% 
religion and to join the pro- 
scribed body. In Ireland it is 
true that he shared the faith of 
the great bulk of the population, 
but in England and in Scotland 
Protestantism was not merely 
official ; to the bulk of the 
population the papacy was the 
Scarlet Woman of the Apoca- 
lypse. It was tolerably manifest that the king was bound to demand at 
least some relaxation in the stringency of the laws against his own co- 
religionists ; but it was no less manifest that concessions could be procured 
only by tact and maintained or extended only by the exercise of conspicuous 
"moderation. 

On the other hand, the masterly dissimulation of Charles II. had enabled 

him to leave the Crown stronger than it had been at any time since the 

491 




&,,?/ 



James II. 
[After the engraved portrait by Giffart.] 



492 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

death of Elizabeth. A standing army had been created which, if not large, 
was still large enough, so long as it remained loyal, to secure the king against 
any serious danger from armed insurrection. For supplies it was true that, 
unless the king held fast to a policy of extreme economy, he was dependent 
on the goodwill either of the King of France or of parliament. But the 
Commons at least were no longer an independent body. County representa- 
tion was controlled by the country gentlemen who were mainly Tories, and 
the reconstruction of the corporations had given the Crown the practical 
control over the boroughs where otherwise Whiggery would have pre- 
dominated. The clergy of the established religion, moreover, were for 'the 
most part committed to doctrines of divine right and of non-resistance. An 
unobtrusive extension of the principles of toleration ought not to have been 
out of reach. 

Unfortunately for himself and for his cause, James was personally wholly 
unfitted for his task. He was of all men the most tactless, in a position 
where tactfulness was a supreme necessity. His incapacity for successful 
dissimulation had procured him a somewhat spurious reputation for straight- 
forward honesty, but that extremely useful reputation he failed to maintain. 
As a young man he had been conspicuously fearless in the battle-field, but 
while he had all the obstinacy which tends to produce crises, he lacked the 
nerve to face a crisis when it arrived. Within three years of his accession 
he had successfully alienated all that loyalty which Whig blundering, the 
crafty duplicity of Charles, and some fortunate accidents had combined to 
place at his disposal. The revolution of 1688 was a Whig triumph, but it 
was brought about by royalist Tories and Anglicans not less than by the 
Whigs. And for that fact the blundering of James himself was chiefly 
responsible. 

Nevertheless the king's first acts had an encouraging aspect. His first 
declarations affirmed his intention of proving his loyalty to the existing 
order. The ministers most employed by Charles in his last years had been 
Rochester, Sunderland, and Godolphin. Although the two latter had both 
supported the Exclusion Bill they were retained in high office. Rochester 
had opposed exclusion, like Halifax, but, being Clarendon's son, he repre- 
sented the tradition of political Anglicanism ; he too was retained as Lord 
Treasurer. It was true that James paraded his own personal adherence to 
Romanism, but as yet the public at large were content to attribute this not 
to sinister intentions but to an open honesty. The merciless punishment 
inflicted upon Titus Oates and his principal accomplice was generally 
accepted as a mere act of justice ; nor was any active resentment aroused 
when James proceeded to order by royal proclamation the collection of the 
Customs which had been accorded to Charles for life but had not yet been 
conferred by parliament on his successor. 

Within five months of James's accession the strength of his position had 
been completely demonstrated. In Scotland the Scottish Estates were con- 
vened ; and although they emphatically confirmed all the existing statutes 



NEMESIS 493 

for the security of Protestantism, they increased the severity of the laws 
against conventicles, extending the application of the death penalty, and in- 
troducing that worst period of the persecution known to Scottish tradition 
as the " Killing Time." In Mayan English parliament assembled, and the 
House of Commons showed an overwhelming Tory preponderance. An 
emphatic declaration on the king's part that he would defend the Church 
sufficed to secure the enthusiastic loyalty of the Commons. The revenue 
granted to Charles was renewed to James, and a further large grant was made 
for naval purposes. 

Meanwhile the extreme Whigs, the Exclusionists, who had taken flight 
from the country after their final rout, made their own desperate attempt. 
Argyle landed in Scotland and sought to raise an insurrection which was 
promptly crushed with complete ease ; 
Argyle himself was captured and exe- 
cuted. While the insurrection in the 
North was collapsing Monmouth landed 
at Lyme Regis, the south-western corner 
of Dorsetshire. He asserted his own 
legitimacy, while professedly leaving his 
title to the Crown to be decided by 
parliament. His pose was that of the 
champion of Protestantism and generally 
of the constitutional principles advocated 
by the Whigs. The appeal to Pro- 
testantism was effective among the rural 
population of Somerset and Devon, who flocked to his standard, ill enough 
armed but full of enthusiasm. But the Whig magnates did not join him, and 
he destroyed such chance as he had by deserting his first position and pro- 
claiming himself king. Monmouth's valiant rustic levies met the king's 
troops at Sedgemoor, where they were completely routed in spite of the 
stubborn valour of their resistance. Monmouth himself was caught and 
carried prisoner to London, where an Act of Attainder had already been 
passed against him, and he was as a matter of course executed after un- 
edifying appeals for mercy, which were rejected by the king with equally 
unedifying harshness. 

The king's lack of nerve was shown not only by his alarm on the occasion 
of Monmouth's rising' but by his encouragement of a vile vindictiveness in 
the punishment of the West Country which followed its very easy suppres- 
sion. The savageries of tl Kirke's Lambs," the troops just returned from 
Tangier, were only the precursors of the brutalities of Jeffreys, who was sent 
to conduct the judicial campaign. Foul-mouthed abuse of accused persons 
and bullying of witnesses smoothed the way for the scandalous sentences 
which have stamped the memory of Judge Jeffreys with indelible infamy, 
and have given to his proceedings the name of the Bloody Assize. The 
number of persons put to death exceeded three hundred, and nearly 




The Sedgemoor Campaign 



494 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

three times as many were transported to convict slavery in the West 
Indies. 

Unwittingly, however, Monmouth had done almost the worst possible 
disservice to James and the best service to Protestantism and constitutionalism 
that he could possibly have rendered, by getting himself executed. Mon- 
mouth was the rock on which the Whigs had split. The moment Monmouth 
was out of the way every one who was ill content turned his thoughts to 
the Dutch Stadtholder and his Stuart wife, the heiress-presumptive of the 
English throne. Neither nobles nor gentry nor commons in England would 
take up arms to set the crown of England on the head of the son of Lucy 
Waters merely because a number of Whig leaders had chosen to pretend to 
believe in his legitimacy. If James had had the wit to spare Monmouth, as 
his brother would have done in the like case, James's antagonist would have 
found it exceedingly difficult to procure the intervention of the Prince of 
Orange. But vindictiveness blinded James to the more subtle policy, and 
by his own act he smoothed the way for his supplanter. 

Before parliament, which was prorogued in the summer, met again in the 
winter, other events had taken place which materially influenced the situation. 
For some time past Louis XIV. had been pressing heavily upon his Pro- 
testant subjects, who had already begun to seek safety in emigration. In 
September he revoked the Edict of Nantes, the charter of Huguenot liberties, 
which for a hundred years past had secured at least a degree of toleration 
for French Protestants. The revocation let loose a storm of persecution, 
and Huguenot refugees began crowding to Brandenburg, Holland, and Eng- 
land. The antagonism to popery which had been quieting down was roused 
anew, in spite of the fact that the Pope and the Hapsburgs, Austrian and 
Spanish, both denounced the methods of the French king. 

James could have selected no worse moment for championing the cause 
of his co-religionists in his own country. The French king was employing 
his soldiery for the persecution, and that fact roused anew the general 
English hostility to a standing army, the more so when Englishmen who 
turned their eyes northwards saw what the king's troops were doing in the 
south-west of Scotland. Nevertheless, James met his parliament with a 
demand for the increase of the standing army, the need of which he thought 
had been proved by the Monmouth rebellion, and with the announcement 
that he had nominated as officers men in whom he had personal confidence, 
but who also happened to be barred from all such appointments by the Test 
Act. The change in the sentiment of parliament was at once apparent, 
though it was by a majority of only one that the House of Commons insisted 
on giving the question of the Roman Catholic officers precedence over that of 
supply. The victory over the Opposition brought waverers over to their side. 
In the result a resolution was presented, in which the House engaged to 
release the officers from the penalties to which they had rendered themselves 
liable by taking office in defiance of the Test Act, but which in effect invited 
the king to cancel their appointment. The House of Lords followed suit. The 



NEMESIS 495 

angry king denounced the conduct of both Houses and prorogued the 
parliament', which was not again assembled, though it was not actually 
dissolved till the midsummer of 1687. 



II 
— PRIUS DEMENT AT 

Never did monarch quite so deliberately seek his own ruin as James II. 
The strength of the monarchy in England rested upon the support of the 
Church, and the loyalty of the gentry in intimate alliance with the Church. 
The clergy and the squires might, not without reluctance but without violent 
opposition, have been induced to accept a gradual relaxation of the penalties 
attaching to Romanism constitutionally conceded by themselves ; but James 
fell back on the old plan of forcing his will on the country by the exercise 
of the royal prerogative, and of doing so in direct defiance of Anglican senti- 
ment. Moreover, by recklessly reviving a parliamentary opposition in a 
House of Commons which had met filled with a loyalty which was prepared 
to run quite considerable risks, James had lost his international independence. 
At the moment of his accession he could have carried England into the 
general combination of European Powers, Protestant and Catholic, which 
was shaping for resistance to the aggressive policy of the French king. After 
his quarrel with parliament, which he prorogued without obtaining the 
supplies for which he had asked, James was forced to appeal to Louis for 
the fianancial aid which was not forthcoming from elsewhere ; practically 
he had to come to Louis as a suppliant not as a bargainer, and even Charles's 
ingenuity had found it hard work to reconcile England to his own covert union 
with his cousin of France. 

James then set himself to widen the breach with the Anglican Church and 
those who, having at the outset been prepared to support him loyally, had 
swelled the ranks of the Opposition at the end of 1685. Every one who had 
helped in his defeat was dismissed from office, and a direct attack was made 
on Compton, the Bishop of London. James created a new Court of Ecclesi- 
astical Commission on the lines of the old Court of High Commission ; and 
on it there were only two bishops, with five laymen, the President being 
Jeffreys. Compton was immediately suspended for refusing to suppress a 
preacher who had taken up his parable against popery. 

The king's next step was to procure a judicial decision in favour of the 
dispensing power. Before a select couit a test case was collusively brought 
against the Roman Catholic Colonel Hales for holding his commission with- 
out obeying the requirements of the Test Act. Hales pleaded dispensation 
from the Crown, and the court, with one dissentient, gave judgment in his 
favour. A batch of Romanist peers was admitted to the Privy Council, a 
Romanist was made Dean of Christchurch at Oxford, and it was commonly 
believed that the Archbishopric of York was being held open while the king 



496 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tried to obtain leave of the Pope to appoint to it the Jesuit Petre. A li No 
Popery " riot in London gave James an excuse for concentrating a force of 
sixteen thousand men on Hounslow Heath. While Sunderland was only 
waiting to avow himself a Roman Catholic, Rochester, at the beginning of 
1687, resigned the Treasurership when he found that dismissal was the only 
alternative to changing his religion. At the same time Rochester's brother, 
Clarendon, was recalled from Ireland, where he held the deputyship, which 
was now placed in the hands of the Romanist Richard Talbot, Earl of 
Tyrconnell. 

By this time it was sufficiently manifest that James was aiming at estab- 
lishing a complete Romanist ascendency by the use of the royal prerogative. 
It was also clear that he had completely broken with Anglican Toryism. But 
the English Roman Catholics provided a foundation far too narrow for the 
throne to rest upon with safety. James and his Jesuit advisers — for it must 
be remembered that he, like Louis, had allied himself not with the Pope 
but with the Jesuits — resolved to seek the alliance of the Protestant dissenters. 
The issue of this resolve was a Declaration of Indulgence, put forth by the 
royal authority alone, which granted liberty of public worship to all Non- 
conformists, Protestant or Romanist, and suspended the application of all 
religious tests to holders of public offices. Anglicanism was scarcely re- 
assured by the accompanying declaration that the established church was to 
be maintained and the lay holders of what had once been ecclesiastical 
property were not to be disturbed. 

Toleration then had been granted at a stroke, and for the moment James 
felt that he had won, since grateful addresses poured in from the Non- 
conformist bodies. But the surprised delight of the dissenters soon gave 
place to alarm. It was true that they at once began to find themselves dis- 
placing in the corporations the Tories who had for so long held the monopoly, 
but it very soon became apparent that the higher offices of State were not to 
be open to all, but were to be made a preserve for Roman Catholics, and that 
all the more important administrative offices were to be filled after the same 
fashion. Oxford itself, the headquarters of Anglicanism, was attacked ; and 
Magdalen College was cleared of its Anglican Fellows, whose places were 
taken by Roman Catholics. 

These proceedings had the double effect of goading the Anglicans out of 
their attitude of non-resistance and passive obedience, and of alarming the 
Nonconformists. Toleration in itself was good ; toleration by royal decree 
was questionable ; toleration as exercised by the Crown might very soon be 
translated into a Romanist tyranny. The first Nonconformist enthusiasm 
was rapidly changing to a suspicious antagonism. James made another bid 
for the support of the dissenters by issuing a second Declaration of In- 
dulgence, followed by an order that the clergy should read it from their 
pulpits on two appointed Sundays. 

By that order passive obedience was strained to the utmost. A meeting 
of London clergy resolved on the exceedingly moderate course of presenting 



NEMESIS 497 

a respectful petition to the king praying that the order might be withdrawn, 
and challenging the legality of the suspension of statutes by royal prerogative. 
The petition was presented in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
Sancroft, and six more bishops ; the saintly Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 
Trelawney of Bristol, White of Peterborough, Lloyd of St. Asaph, Lake of 
Chichester, and Turner of Ely. This was two days before the Declaration 
was to be read. Next day the petition was printed and circulated. On the 
Sunday the churches were filled with anxious congregations, but only in 
four places was the Declaration read ; to the joy of dissenters as well as of 
Anglicans. The king plunged forward along the fatal path which he had 
chosen. He resolved to prosecute the 
bishops for publishing a "seditious libel." 
Three weeks after the presentation of the 
petition the seven bishops were lodged in 
the Tower to await trial, their passage 
thither being accompanied by the sym- 
pathising applause of the populace. 

Public excitement was already at fever 
heat ; two days later it was roused to a still 
higher pitch by the announcement that at 
last a son had been born to James. With 
that strange infatuation which clung to every 
act of the king, the strict ceremonial attend- 
ing the birth of a royal infant was ne- 
glected. Nine-tenths of the public believed, 
as might have been expected in the circum- 
stances, that the story was a fiction ; that the babe was supposititious, not 
the offspring of the queen at all. There were several details which gave 
colour to the rumour. The birth provided an heir-apparent to the throne 
who would certainly be brought up as a Roman Catholic. The child would 
exclude Mary of Orange and her husband, unless, as the Princess Anne 
remarked, it "became an angel in heaven." Hitherto Protestants had 
reckoned with confidence that, whatever James himself might do, it was 
at least certain that his successor would be a Protestant. The certainty 
vanished with the birth of the boy. Excited Romanists, including the king, 
discovered that a miracle had been wrought ; excited Protestants discovered 
not a miracle but a monstrous fraud. 

Again three weeks passed and the day of the trial of the bishops arrived. 
At first it was hoped that the charge would collapse upon technical points, 
but the Crown surmounted the technical difficulties. The case was fought 
out on its merits. Of the four judges, two summed up in favour of the 
Crown, two in favour of the bishops. The jury at first declared themselves 
unable to agree. They were shut up for the night to argue it out. In 
the morning it was announced, to the frenzied joy of the populace, that 
the seven bishops were acquitted. Ominously enough for the king, 

2 I 




The Seven Bishops. 
[From a medal contemporary with the trial.] 



498 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

even tl Kirke's Lambs" on Hounslow Heath shouted their Protestant 
satisfaction. 

James had urged on the prosecution, fanatically credulous that the birth 
of his son had been a signal mark of Heaven's favour for the course which 
he was pursuing. On the night after the seven bishops were acquitted, 
Admiral Herbert, disguised as a common seaman, was carrying to The Hague 
a letter inviting the intervention of William of Orange ; it bore the signatures 
of the Tories Danby and Lumley, of the Whig Earls of Devonshire and 
Shrewsbury, of Henry Sidney and Edward Russell, brothers of the two chief 
victims of the Rye House Plot, and of Compton, the Bishop of London. 

Ill 

FULFILMENT 

William of Orange was primarily a Dutch patriot whose ruling passion 
was the desire to curb the aggression of Louis XIV. If he wanted the crown 
of England, which, until the birth of King James's son, had seemed likely to 
descend to his own wife in the natural course of events, it was not from 
motives of personal ambition, but because it would secure England as the 
ally of Holland against France. As matters stood, while James reigned in 
England the king, if left to his own devices, was very unlikely to join an 
anti-French coalition, although English sentiment was notoriously hostile to 
France. William had no idea of coming forward as the champion of an 
English party to eject James from his throne and seat himself on it as an 
obvious usurper. The defence of Holland against Louis was much more to 
him than the acquisition of an exceedingly unstable throne which would pre- 
vent him from throwing all his energies into European politics. But it would 
be a very different thing if he reinforced English public opinion so as to 
enable it to compel James to act as it directed. To do so, however, it was 
imperative for him to be quite certain that his intervention would be accept- 
able to public opinion, and that the policy he advocated would be endorsed 
by it. The birth of the prince gave him a fresh incentive. There was no 
longer any reason to expect that sooner or later his wife would succeed to 
the throne without any intervention on his part. Already in spring he had 
gone so far as to promise that he would intervene in arms if a request that 
he should do so came from sufficiently influential quarters. That request 
had now come, backed by the urgent advice that he should cancel his first 
formal recognition of the birth of an heir to the throne, and should assert his 
wife's title to the succession, repudiating the legitimacy of the lately born 
infant. 

Louis XIV., unfortunately for himself, played into the hands of his adver- 
sary. In order that William might take active steps in England it was 
in the first place necessary for him to have an effective force of Dutch troops 
at his disposal to take part in the enterprise, since it would by no means 



NEMESIS 499 

have satisfied him to depend upon insurrectionary levies in face of the king's 
troops. In the second place William could not move if Holland itself were 
being immediately threatened by Louis ; in such circumstances Dutch troops, 
the Dutch navy, and the Dutch Stadtholder could not absent themselves. In 
the third place it was desirable to avoid giving the enterprise the appearance 
of an anti-Catholic crusade lest William's Catholic allies on the continent 
should be offended. 

Now Louis, by the great persecution of his own Protestant subjects, had 
secured the predominance of the anti-French party in Protestant Holland ; 
suspicions of an alliance between James and Louis fostered there the senti- 
ment which favoured William's plan. The Stadtholder found no great diffi- 
culty in procuring means for substantial armament, nominally for the defence 
of Holland. Again, if Louis had realised what would be the outcome of 
William's intervention in England, he might have secured himself against 
future woes by merely keeping the Dutch in fear of invasion. But he grasped 
at the prospect of an immediate gain instead of warding off the future 
danger. The office of Archbishop of Cologne, whose holder was one of the 
seven electoral princes of the Empire, was vacant. Louis's candidate for the 
electorship was defeated by the Imperial and Papal candidate, through the 
action of the Pope, and Louis resolved to enforce his claim at the sword's 
point. French troops entered the Palatinate. Louis, if the phrase may be 
permitted, killed two of William's birds for him with one stone. He had in 
effect made an aggressive attack at once on the two heads, ecclesiastical and 
secular, of Roman Catholic Christendom, the Pope and the Emperor. There 
was no fear that those powers would now quarrel with William for an enter- 
prise to restrain James from associating himself with Louis. And further, by 
invading the Palatinate, Louis had committed himself to a campaign which 
precluded him from making any immediate attack upon Holland, and had 
thereby set William and the Dutch troops and fleet free for independent action. 

No one except Louis and James had any ostensible ground for opposing 
William's policy. More than twelve months ago, in response to James's 
attempt to procure his endorsement of the policy of "toleration," he had 
very expressly made known his own view — that freedom of worship was 
desirable, but that the religious tests, as conditions of holding public office, 
ought not to be withdrawn. That satisfied nine-tenths of the people of 
England, and satisfied also the Catholic Powers. 

Meanwhile, for nearly three months after the acquittal of the bishops 
James continued to blunder along the old line, dismissed the two judges 
who had been in favour of the bishops, threatened the clergy who had 
abstained from reading the Declaration of Indulgence, and shut his eyes to 
William's preparations. Then he took sudden alarm. Troops were hurried 
over from Ireland and summoned from Scotland. Despairing of vigorous 
support from the dissenters, the king executed a volte face, and made a 
series of concessions to the Anglicans. Officials who had been dismissed 
for adhering to the Test Act were reinstated. And yet although he had 



500 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

announced his intention of summoning a parliament — in which the Commons, 
for reasons already explained, would have been in effect a packed assembly, 
and the Lords could have been controlled by the creation of peers and the 
readmission of Roman Catholics — he feared the risks ; parliament was not 
summoned. Louis had tried to save him by warning the United Provinces 
that any movement on their part against James would be treated as an act of 
hostility to himself. To conciliate the Dutch James made overtures to them, 
accompanied by declarations that there was no treaty between himself and 
Louis. The Dutch took the overtures for a trap, and declined to be en- 
snared ; but Louis was extremely irritated, and at once cancelled the pre- 




The Embarkation of William of Orange for England, 1688. 
[After a contemporary print.] 

parations which he had just resolved upon for direct measures against 
Holland. « 

At the end of October all that William needed was a favourable wind ; 
until then westerly gales had defeated all attempts to set sail. But on 
November 1st a "Protestant wind" from the east carried William's ships 
to sea, while it held James's fleet wind-locked in the estuary of the Thames. 
William passed down channel unmolested and landed at Tor Bay on 
November 5th. * 

William's arrival aroused no enthusiasm. He was not naturally endowed 
with the superficial qualities which make for an easy if insecure popularity, 
nor did he ever condescend to cultivate them. He had none of the winning 
graces on which Shaftesbury had relied when he chose Monmouth to be 
the rival of James. Moreover he was a foreigner, and Englishmen are 
seldom ready to take a foreigner on trust. Also the nation was not in love 
with revolutions, and was doubting whether a revolution would be really 




ffl ^ 



NEMESIS 501 

necessary to secure its present aims. The king had conceded so much 
during the last weeks that there was reasonable hope of extracting the rest 
of the national demands without proceeding to the last extremities. Had a 
Tudor been upon the throne of England William would not have been long 
in the country unless as a prisoner. 

But James, as usual, carefully threw away all his chances. The obviously 
politic course he could hardly have been expected to follow. That course 
would have been the immediate summoning of a parliament and the dismissal 
of Romanist officials. James, in plain terms, could have secured his throne if 
he could have brought himself frankly to accept the principle which William 
had publicly recommended — of toleration for all forms of worship accom- 
panied by religious tests for public office. His son-in-law would have been 
left with no justification for remaining in the country, except the demand 
that James should deny the legitimacy of the infant prince, a demand which 
it would have been quite impossible to make good. 

With this James would not be content ; but he still had an alternative. 
If he had appealed to the nation as the national king, declining to accept the 
dictation of English affairs by a foreign prince backed by a foreign army, the 
probabilities were that his appeal would have been successful. That chance 
he spoilt by his conspicuous mistrust of Englishmen. Even his own 
English troops were already disgusted by the arrival of the Irish regiments ; 
instead of assuming that all true patriots must be on his side, and would join 
him in teaching the foreign invader a severe lesson, he made it obvious that 
he was afraid to fight William. By behaving as if his cause was already lost, 
he ruined a more than respectable chance of victory. A rapid march to the 
west would have created a conviction of confidence which would have 
secured the waverers on his own side ; vacillation and the display of his 
desire to remove the infant prince out of the country to safe quarters in 
France had the precisely contrary effect. With every day's delay the 
certainty increased that the malcontents would declare for William, and 
when once they began to do so openly a steady stream of desertions was 
assured. And meanwhile William was carefully abstaining from any action 
which might arouse hostility, and was maintaining the theory that he was 
in England not to claim the crown, but to secure a free parliament and a 
constitutional government. 

Ten days after William's landing men began to declare themselves, 
many of the gentry of the west joining William's standard. Danby in 
Yorkshire and the Earl of Devonshire in the Midlands began to raise troops 
in those regions. James had given the command of his troops to the 
incompetent Lord Feversham, who was a Frenchman born. When it was 
decided that the forces, which were assembled at Salisbury, should fall 
back to cover London instead of taking the offensive, John Churchill and 
the Duke of Grafton went over to William ; they were followed immediately 
by George of Denmark, the husband of the Princess Anne, and then by 
Anne herself. 



502 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Before the end of the month James had made up his mind that the 
game was lost and that flight was the only course left for him, although in 
the meantime he had agreed to a course which might have saved his throne. 
The Tories who had remained loyal to him, reinforced by Halifax, extracted 
from him the promise to summon a parliament in January, dismiss the 
popish officers, break off alliance with France, issue a general amnesty, and 
send three of their own number — Halifax, Nottingham, and Godolphin — as 
commissioners to treat with William. But even when the commissioners 
were treating he succeeded in despatching his wife and child out of the 
country ; and on the same night he himself took flight, dropping the great 
seal into the Thames by way of embarrassing any possible administration, 
after having, with the same object, destroyed the writs for the assembling of 
parliament. 

The king's flight cleared the way, or seemed to do so, for William to estab- 
lish a provisional government. Some of the most unpopular of James's 
adherents attempted to follow his example ; Judge Jeffreys, amongst others, 
was caught and hardly saved from the fury of the mob, to die soon after- 
wards in the Tower. And yet James was given another chance. By sheer 
accident the fugitive was caught by some fishermen and detained at Sheer- 
ness. The Council of Peers, who had temporarily assumed the functions 
of a government, brought him back to London, where, in the curiously 
oscillating state of public opinion, his return was received with bonfires, bell- 
ringing, and general acclamation. 

Nevertheless the flight itself had really sealed James's fate. It had seemed 
for the moment to give William what he could not venture to claim ; for it 
was one thing to eject James by force, and quite another to act on the 
assumption that his voluntary flight was equivalent to an abdication. It had 
carried over Halifax and others of James's ablest supporters to William's 
camp, and it was now William's object to frighten James into a repetition 
of the performance, and to take care that this time his escape should be un- 
hindered. Some display of coercion was all that was needed to give effect 
to William's design. On December 22 James fled for the second time, to be 
hospitably received by the king of France, who established him in the palace 
of St. Germain. 

The disappearance of the king left no legal government in England. There 
was no parliament, and no existing council which could claim authority. 
William was the only person who could deal with the emergency, and he did 
so characteristically. He summoned an assembly consisting of all those who 
had sat in any of the parliaments of Charles II.; not members of James's parlia- 
ment, because elections since the suspension of the charters were held not to 
have been free. To these were added fifty members of the corporation of 
London. This assembly promptly resolved that a free Convention should be 
summoned, a parliament in all but name, like the Convention which recalled 
Charles II. Till this body should be assembled William was requested to 
exercise the executive functions of government, and to this request he 



NEMESIS 



503 




acceded. The boroughs elected their representatives under the old charters 
which had been cancelled in the last years of Charles II. 

The Convention's first step was to pass two resolutions — that James by 
his flight had abdicated the throne, which was therefore vacant ; and that it 
was against public policy that it should be occupied by a prince of the popish 
religion. By the Lords, however, the first resolution was so far changed that 
it did not assert the throne to be vacant. The Commons, among whom there 
was a great Whig preponderance, in effect declared that a monarch was to 
be elected ; the Lords implied that some one or other was already dejure 
monarch. The settlement was not a very simple matter. Many Tories clung 
to the old plan of a regency. Danby and others, supported by some of 
the Whigs, desired 
to claim the crown 
for Mary herself. 
According to the 
strict law of heredi- 
tary succession, if 
the infant prince 
were excluded, Mary 
stood first, Anne and 
her children next, 
and after them 
William. These 
three came to the 
rescue. Mary de- 
clined to accept the crown unless it was shared by her husband. Anne 
recognised that it would be to the public advantage that William should 
reign, and that her own succession should be deferred till after his death 
as well as Mary's. William recognised that this was a personal arrange- 
ment, and that in the event 'of his having children by another wife than 
Mary, Anne and her offspring should have precedence of those children. 
It merely remained for William to remark that he did not claim the throne 
for himself, but that he had no intention of remaining in England in any 
capacity except that of king. If the crown were offered him he would 
accept it; if it were not he would return to Holland. Both Houses were 
now ready to accept the solution which placed William and Mary on the 
throne as joint sovereigns, the sovereignty being continued to the survivor. 
If they had children, those children would succeed their parents in due 
course ; if not, Anne and her children would succeed. William being 
the next heir, his children by any subsequent marriage would stand next in 
the succession, and after them the Protestant who stood nearest to the 
throne, whoever that might be. 

It was further resolved that, before the throne should be actually filled, 
securities should be obtained for the national laws, liberties, and religion. 
But it was clearly impossible to wait for the preparation of a detailed written 



A medal commemorating the flight of James II. : the breaking of the 
oak and the flourishing of the orange tree. 



504 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

constitution ; and the Houses satisfied themselves by drawing up the Declara- 
tion of Right. The practices of the last two reigns which were regarded as 
subversive of the constitution were precisely set forth. Thus once more the 
exaction of money without a direct parliamentary grant was expressly pro- 
hibited ; the suspending and dispensing powers — the right, that is, of sus- 
pending the general operation of a statute, as in the case of the Declaration 
of Indulgence, or of granting dispensations from its operation in particular 
cases, as in the appointment of Romanist officials — was pronounced con- 
trary to the law ; so was the maintenance of a standing army without 
consent of parliament ; so was the establishment of arbitrary courts, such as 
that of Ecclesiastical Commission. Popular rights were further definitely 
asserted ; the right of presenting petitions to the king, violated by the treat- 
ment of the seven bishops ; the right of free election and free debate in 
parliament ; and the right to the frequent assembly of parliament. The 
crown was offered to William and Mary conditionally on their acceptance of 
this latest charter of national liberties. Their acceptance was accompanied 
by the Act of Settlement fixing the succession on the lines laid down ; and 
William and Mary were proclaimed king and queen of England and Ireland 
on February 13, 1689. Thus was the Glorious Revolution of Whig tradi- 
tion carried to completion ; and since the official New Year was still dated 
not from the January 1 but from March 25, t68S remained the titular date 
year of the new order. 



ffey- 



CHAPTER XX 
THE REVOLUTION 

I 

THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT 

King William III. had neither sought nor accepted the crown of England 
as a nominee of a political party. He was king because if James and his 
son were excluded from the throne 
Mary and her husband were in effect 
the only possible occupants. Being 
king, he was resolved to rule con- 
scientiously and impartially, but the 
government of the new kingdoms was 
in his eyes secondary to his aims as 
the leader of European resistance to 
French aggression. So long as he 
could best serve those aims by retaining 
the English crown, that crown was of 
use to him, but if he found himself 
hampered in his foreign policy by the 
action of English parties, England 
would be merely an incubus. His 
strength lay in the fact that England 
could not afford to let him go. 

On the other hand, he was accepted 
without enthusiasm by any party. 
Of the Tories many were wedded to 
the doctrine of passive obedience, and 

only acquiesced in the new order because of their fears of a Romanist 
domination, with doubt in their hearts if not on their lips whether their 
allegiance to James could be discarded on any pretext whatever. Half the 
Whigs, on the other hand, wanted in effect to have a republic with a royal 
figurehead, not a monarch with a will of his own. One party, in short, was 
inclined, if provoked, to challenge his title, and the other to curtail his prero- 
gative, but neither was prepared to go so far as to drive him to resign his 
crown. And William did not himself wish to resign his crown so long as 
the possession of it served the purposes of his continental policy. 

Now, unlike William himself, the English people were more keenly 




William III. 



506 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

interested in their domestic concerns than in the problem of bridling the 
ambitions of Louis XIV. They were unfriendly to Louis mainly perhaps 
on account of his persecution of the Protestants. They were quite willing 
to see him bridled, and they were very unwilling indeed to support him 
actively ; but foreign affairs were in their eyes secondary to domestic con- 
cerns. William chafed, while the Convention, transformed into a parlia- 
ment by his establishment on the throne, insisted on giving precedence to 

the affairs which in its eyes were of 
primary interest. 

One of the first Acts of the 
parliament incidentally solved a prob- 
lem which had been left unsettled 
by the Declaration of Right. A 
regiment on the point of embarkation 
for Holland mutinied and declared 
for King James. A Mutiny Act was 
consequently passed which, while it 
provided for the maintenance of the 
army for six months, afterwards ex- 
tended to twelve, subjected deserters 
to punishment by martial law. In 
effect it followed that at theconclusion 
of the twelve months the standing 
army would cease to exist unless the 
Act were renewed. By making twelve 
months the period of the Act, the 
parliament also made it necessary 
that the Houses should be summoned 
annually ; that is, that twelve months 
should not pass without their being 
assembled. The duration of parlia- 
ment was not touched, nor was there any formal Act requiring that parliament 
should meet ; but its annual assembly was from thenceforth an administra- 
tive necessity. Like the Habeas Corpus Act, this measure, of great consti- 
tutional importance, was unpremeditated, and became law almost by 
accident. 

The first obviously necessary step was the imposition of an oath of 
allegiance to the new Government, the penalty for its refusal being dis- 
ability to hold office. Apart from the clergy there were not many refusals ; 
even those who held that James was still king de jure accepted William's 
de facto sovereignty. Among the clergy, however, there was a less ready 
acquiescence. Many of them were thoroughly committed to the doctrine 
of non-resistance, and felt unable to transfer their allegiance. Five of 
" the seven bishops " demonstrated their loyalty to principle by refusing 
the oath, and their example was followed by some hundreds of the clergy, 




fUl'HQ ir) v 



Queen Mary II. 



THE REVOLUTION 507 

who, as a necessary consequence, resigned their preferments. No further 
penalty however was exacted, and the " Non-Jurors," as they were called, 
for the most part continued to find congregations or patrons who approved 
of their principles and provided them with a livelihood. 

The Declaration of Right left unsettled sundry constitutional questions 
which still required to be dealt with by statute ; but before these came up 
for consideration it was necessary to arrange religious affairs. William 
himself was a Calvinist, while his wife was an Anglican ; sentiment and 
policy caused both of them to favour toleration. But the events preceding 
the Revolution had hardened popular feeling against Romanists, while they 
had clearly given to the Protestant dissenters a very strong claim for con- 
sideration. The latter, in spite of strong temptation, had declined the 
benefits conceded to them by the Declaration of Indulgence, when they 
found that the price to be paid for them involved absolutist innovations 
and Romanist ascendency. Churchmen, in consequence, had gone far 
towards committing themselves at least to a relaxation of the laws which 
pressed upon dissenters. The Revolution itself and its stability were in so 
great a degree due to the attitude of the Nonconformists that the Revolu- 
tion Government could not have left their position unaltered. 

The first method of dealing with the situation proposed was a Compre- 
hension Bill, which was intended to admit within the pale of the Church a 
large number of the Nonconformists, a measure on the lines which had 
been anticipated by the Presbyterians on the Restoration of Charles II. 
But during the years intervening the barrier between Nonconformity and 
orthodox Churchmanship had hardened. While the theory of comprehen- 
sion was perhaps generally approved, the practical difficulties were not 
easy to overcome, and the bill was dropped before reaching the final stage. 
A substitute was found in a Toleration Act, which virtually conceded 
freedom of public worship and cancelled the whole effects of the Con- 
venticle and Five Mile Acts. But there was no relaxation of the laws as 
applied to Papists, or to those whose rejection of the doctrine of the 
Trinity excluded them from recognition as Christians. Put if freedom of 
public worship was granted, the retention of the Test und Corporation 
Acts still shut out Nonconformists as well as Papists from the official 
service of the State or the municipality, military and naval as well as civil, 
and they continued to be debarred from the education of the universities. 
Not till the nineteenth century were these disabilities removed, although 
their effect was minimised partly by technical devices, and partly in course 
of time by annual Acts of Indemnity for breaches of the law. In effect 
what the Toleration Act did was to leave the position of Romanists 
unchanged and to retain the disabling Acts against Protestant dissenters, 
while relieving them from the penal portions of the Clarendon Code. 

William, in accordance with the principle upon which he always desired 
to act, selected his ministers from both parties, while his real confidence 
continued to be given to his own compatriots. Danby and Nottingham 



5 o8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

came from the Tory side, Shrewsbury was a Whig, Halifax had acted inde- 
pendently of party, and had at one time or another led and opposed both 
sections. Churchill's services procured him the earldom of Marlborough. 
Danby, with a painful disregard for the convenience of future generations, 
was made Marquis of Caermarthen ; five years later the confusion was 
made worse by his elevation to the dukedom of Leeds. Having noted the 
fact, it may be found simplest to refer to him throughout by the first and 
most familiar of his titles. This recognition of Tories was displeasing to 
the Whigs with their substantial majority in the Commons, since they had 
intended to make the victory their own, to appropriate the spoils, and to 
punish vindictively all those who had aided and abetted the Crown in ex- 
cluding them from power. Danby and Halifax were the special objects of 
their hostility. William, on the other hand, was convinced that he needed 
the support of the Tories as a body, and was strongly opposed to taking 
measures which would inevitably alienate them. The Whig proposal to re- 
taliate on the Tories, by disabling every one concerned in the upsetting of 
the old corporations from holding municipal office, brought about the dis- 
solution of the Convention Parliament and the summoning of a new one 
in March 1690. 

Before the dissolution the Declaration of Right received statutory con- 
firmation as the Bill of Rights. The bill was not precisely identical with 
the Declaration, since it was more precise and complete in the abolition of 
the dispensing as distinct from the suspending power. Hitherto it had 
been generally assumed that the former might legitimately be exercised 
upon occasion ; but the abuse of it which had converted an exceptional 
privilege into a normal procedure caused it to be done away with altogether. 
There was also much discussion as to distinguishing the next Protestant 
heir by name. This was in fact Sophia, the wife of the Elector of Hanover 
and sister of Prince Rupert. But there were various possibilities that other 
persons with a prior legitimist title might become entitled to precedence by 
adopting Protestantism before the succession became an immediate ques- 
tion, and her nomination was rejected. The Protestant succession was 
secured, however, by the requirement that every future sovereign should 
make the Declaration laid down in the Test Act, and that marriage with a 
Papist should be a bar. 

When the new parliament met Halifax was driven to resign office by 
the violence of the attacks upon him. The general result was that the 
Whigs lost their majority in the Commons, while Danby became the pre- 
dominant figure in Council. There was not, of course, a formal reconstruc- 
tion of the ministry on party lines, but practically the Whigs in parliament 
assumed the character of an Opposition. The king, however, checked the 
attempt at reprisals for the past by proposing an Act of Grace, from the 
benefits of which only a few persons were excluded, chief among whom 
was Sunderland. When the parliament had bestowed upon William and 
Mary for life the permanent revenue which had been conferred upon Charles 



THE REVOLUTION 509 

and James, the most pressing parliamentary questions were settled, and 
William left Mary in England associated with a group of " Lords Justices " 
in control of the Administration, while he himself went over to Ireland 
where danger was threatening. 



II 

IRELAND 

In England, and, as we shall presently see, in Scotland, the strength of 
Protestantism ensured the rule of William and Mary against anything like 
a national insurrection. Nothing of the kind was attempted in the one 
country ; in the other, though Dundee raised the standard of King James, 
it was with the knowledge that the Jacobite cause could not succeed- with- 
out reinforcements, and when Dundee himself fell in battle the victory of 
the government was assured. With Ireland, however, the case was very 
different. There the great .bulk of the population was Roman Catholic. 
That population had its particular grievances, besides the general grievance 
of subjection to England ; but it had every reason to favour a Stuart regime 
with its promise of a Catholic ascendency, in preference to that of a govern- 
ment pledged to Protestant principles and the repression of Romanists. 

In Ireland, then, while there was no particular sentiment of loyalty to 
the House of Stuart, personal interest drew the majority of the population 
to favour the Jacobite cause. In Ireland, moreover, the rule of Tyrconnell 
under James II. had in effect transferred political power to the Romanists. 
In Ireland, as in England, the corporations had been manipulated, but in 
Ireland there was no Test Act to preserve their Protestantism. And for 
Ireland the restoration of James would mean a revolution and the upsetting 
of the Land Settlement, made on the restoration of Charles, which had 
kept the proprietorship of the soil in the hands of the Protestant minority. 

Now, England had not forgotten the Irish insurrection of 1641, nor 
the fears of an Irish army being employed for the coercion of England 
when Strafford was Deputy. James looked to Ireland as the base from 
which he would be able to recover the crown of England. But to William 
that country appeared to be of minor importance ; he had no inclination 
to withdraw troops from England to serve in Ireland, especially as Tyr- 
connell, who had the whole Irish administration in his own hands, appeared 
willing to negotiate. The king sent over Tyrconnell's brother-in-law to 
arrange terms, but the agent promptly associated himself with the Earl, who, 
after a very brief delay, threw off the mask. The Protestant settlers outside 
Ulster were quickly overpowered, and, in Ulster, were swept into London- 
derry and Enniskillen. Before the end of March, 1689, James himself had 
landed at Cork without any attempt having been made to obstruct his 
passage, and proceeded to Dublin, where he summoned a parliament. 



5io THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The action of that parliament showed the use which the long depressed 
majority intended to make of the advantage which they believed themselves 
to have won. Their declaration in favour of James was a matter of course ; 
so was their announcement of toleration for all religions. Next came a 
series of acts oversetting the claims of the English parliament and English 
authorities to override the parliament of Ireland. Landowners were in 
future to pay the tithe to their own Church ; but, as the overturning of the 
Land Settlement practically displaced all Protestant landowners in favour 
of Catholics, this meant that the tithe would go to the Roman Catholic 
clergy, who were no longer to be barred from holding ecclesiastical 
appointments. But the most subversive measures referred to the land. 
All forfeitures and settlements since 1641 were cancelled ; the land was to 
be restored in possession to the representatives of those who had possessed 












Jl»-^i«=iiAn=Jl"i"l|^ll l l'l V ~^~ ~ — «-L 



.'/;,//!! llllllHMIII/ 



/iiiliiiuiiui; 




'^^ 



~> 



_> 



Londonderry about 1680. 
[From a contemporary drawing in the British Museum.] 

it at that date. The lands of persons now in " rebellion " against James 
II. were to be appropriated to the Crown, and from them compensation 
was to be provided for those persons who had bought land since the Settle- 
ment and were displaced by the restoration of such land to its former 
owners. How the land of these rebels could be at the same time appro- 
priated to the Crown and restored to the original owners the legislators did 
not pause to inquire. Parliament went on to pass an Act of Attainder 
containing the names of some sixty peers and more than two thousand 
commoners. Their property was forfeited, but they were to have the 
opportunity of taking their trial, and recovering it if they proved themselves 
innocent. The amazing proceedings of this parliament may perhaps 
account for the extreme vindictiveness displayed when a Protestant parlia- 
ment recovered the mastery. 

During the summer months it appeared quite possible that the Pro- 
testants might be wiped out altogether. Enniskillen was hard pressed, and 



THE REVOLUTION 511 

Londonderry was subjected to a rigorous siege and close investment. 
Within those towns, however, there was a fine spirit of stubborn resistance. 
The Derry garrison was resolved to hold out to the last gasp. After long 
delay English troops, under the command of the notorious Colonel Kirke, 
reached Lough Foyle, only to declare themselves unable to force the boom 
which guarded the river. But when the garrison was on the verge 
of sheer starvation urgent advices from England put an end to Kirke's in- 
action. The boom was forced, Londonderry was relieved, and when once 
the blockade was broken the siege was useless. On the same day the 
garrison of Enniskillen met and routed at Newton Butler a superior 
force which had been sent against them. 

In William's own view the sound course of action was not to divert 
forces to Ireland, but to employ them in a direct attack on France, since 
the French were assisting King James with men, money, and stores. But 
he could not resist the pressure of public opinion, and his principal marshal, 
Schomberg, once a Huguenot officer in the armies of King Louis, was 
despatched to Ulster. But his force was attacked by sickness, and he was 
unable to adopt an offensive strategy. As the spring of 1690 advanced 
William resolved to bring the Irish War to a conclusion — to throw a large 
force into the country, and to take command of it himself. 

It is not easy to understand why so little had hitherto been done by 
the fleets either of France or of England. To either, the effective command 
of the seas should have secured effective mastery in Ireland. Apparently 
each was afraid to challenge the other. Under the influence of Colbert 
France had acquired a powerful fleet even in the time of the last Anglo- 
Dutch War. But while England had only made one abortive attempt to 
sever the communications between France and Ireland, when Admiral 
Herbert was defeated at Bantry Bay, France now made no attempt to 
interfere with the passage of William, his troops and his supplies, to Ireland. 
When the thing was done the able French Admiral Tourville took the seas 
and inflicted a disastrous defeat on the combined English and Dutch 
squadrons off Beachy Head, thereby creating a panic in England. But for 
the purposes of the Irish War his victory was perfectly futile. The engage- 
ment at Beachy Head took place on June 30th ; on July 1st William routed 
James's army at the Boyne Water. James hastily concluded that his cause 
was lost and fled to Waterford, whence he found his way by sea to France. 

Apart from the fact that William had to effect the difficult operation of 
forcing a ford in the face of the enemy, no great interest would have 
attached to the battle of the Boyne if it had not moved James to take flight. 
As it was, Ulster and Leinster were lost to the Jacobites, but their hold on 
Connaught and Munster was not relaxed. The French were predominant on 
the sea, and four important Irish harbours were open to them. England 
"for the moment was almost denuded of troops, and probably the invasion 
of England was more immediately practicable than at any time before or 
since. But Louis declined to make the attempt, and the next time that the 



5 12 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

French and English fleets met the balance was to be turned decisively and 
permanently in favour of England. 

The panic caused by the battle of Beachy Head was somewhat allayed 
by the news of the Boyne, and by the discovery that the French fleet 
intended to make no further use of its victory. William's own return to 
England was delayed by his desire to capture Limerick, into which a 
valiant band of Irish Jacobites threw themselves when both Tyrconnell and 
the French General Lauzun had lost heart. But William was eager to 
leave Ireland and take the command of the armies in Holland, and when 
his first approach was repulsed by Patrick Sarsfield he withdrew. Marl- 
borough, however, undertook a campaign in the south, which at once de- 
prived the Jacobites of the valuable harbours of Cork and Kinsale. In June 
and July of the following year Ginckel, to whom William had now en- 
trusted the Irish command, defeated the French commander St. Ruth at 




A medal of 1690 commemorative of the Battle of the Boyne. 

Athlone and Aghrim, and only Limerick remained to offer a desperate re- 
sistance. When Ginckel brought up the siege guns which had hitherto been 
wanting, Sarsfield saw that the defence could not be maintained. He 
succeeded in obtaining terms which were the well-deserved reward of a 
heroic defence. The garrisons were given free leave to depart and enroll 
themselves in the Irish regiments, which were to render splendid service to 
France in her wars for many a year to come. But beyond this, pledges 
were given that the Irish Roman Catholics were to have the same religious 
freedom as in the reign of Charles II. Practically the terms of the capi- 
tulation of Limerick itself were to be applied to all the remaining Jacobite 
garrisons, who had the choice of free withdrawal or of remaining as the 
liege subjects of King William in the enjoyment of a complete amnesty. 
The capitulation was in effect a general treaty to which the alternative 
would have been a prolonged guerilla war which it was of the utmost im- 
portance to William that he should avoid. 

The disastrous breach of faith which followed the capitulation and 
the self-chosen exile of Ireland's most enterprising sons was the most 



THE REVOLUTION 513 

shameful episode in the history of the relations between Ireland and Eng- 
land. The English parliament at Westminster passed a law for Ireland 
which was, broadly speaking, an application of the Test Act to all office- 
holders and members of parliament in Ireland. The result was the assembly of 
an exclusively Protestant parliament in Dublin, and that parliament made 
haste to tear up the Treaty of Limerick. The proceedings of James's Irish 
parliament were annulled, and a series of penal laws against the Catholics 
were enacted. Papists were forbidden to teach in schools, to carry arms, 
or to send their children abroad to be educated. The Romanist clergy 
were exiled. The estates of Roman Catholics descended not to the oldest 
son but to all the sons ; if one of them elected to turn Protestant the 
whole estate passed to him ; and if a Protestant heiress married a Papist 
she forfeited her title. In a country where four-fifths of the population 
were Romanists every Romanist was cut off from participation in public affairs, 
from military service, from educating his children, from acquiring land, or 
from handing down a consolidated estate to later generations. The utter 
helplessness to which the Catholics were reduced is shown by the paralysis 
which fell upon them. Jacobitism never again lifted its head in Ireland, 
not because the Irish would not have been Jacobites if they could, but 
because they could not if they would. 



Ill 
SCOTLAND 

The reign of James II. or James VII. had opened in Scotland that 
period of cruel persecution known as the " Killing Time." To this era 
belong the most famous of the martyrdoms, the shooting of the carrier 
John Brown before the eyes of his wife, and the drowning of Margaret 
Wilson and Margaret M'Lauchlan in the Sol way, with the latter of which, 
it may be remarked, Claverhouse was in no way concerned. But the 
persecuting policy was no more possible for James in Scotland than in 
England ; it inevitably gave place in the Northern as well as in the Southern 
country to the policy of theoretical toleration. In Scotland, as in England, 
it was not possible to aim at the advancement of Roman Catholics, or even 
at their general relief, without conceding a like freedom to the Noncon- 
formist Protestants. In proportion as the law bore more hardly on a 
larger portion of the population, the Scottish Presbyterians were more 
ready than their English brethren to accept the Indulgence decreed by the 
king in both countries in 1687. 

It must further be observed that there was not in Scotland the same 
constitutional ground as in England for rejecting as dangerous gifts bestowed 
by the arbitrary power of the Crown, because the constitutional powers of 
the Crown were not limited either by custom or by statute as they were in 

2 K 



5 H THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

England. Yet the fact that the king's real purpose was the advancement of 
Papists was sufficiently manifest, and caused uneasiness and resentment on 
all sides. Opposition, however, was much more difficult to organise effec- 
tively, while the forces of the Crown were not merely, as in England, a 
coercive power which the Crown held in reserve, but a normally active 
instrument for the repression of opposition. 

Thus the position in Scotland presented itself to James as perfectly 
secure, and he had no qualms in summoning Claverhouse, who had now 
become Viscount Dundee, to lead the bulk of the Scottish troops over the 
border in the autumn of 1688. But by so doing his government lost the 
control of Scotland. A stream of malcontents hurried to the South with the 
obvious intention of adapting their own further action to the course of events 
in England. The flight of James to France paralysed his supporters, and 
immediately after the formal acceptance of the crown of England by 
William and Mary, a Convention Parliament assembled in Scotland. 

In that Convention it became at once apparent that the majority were 
opposed to the return of King James. That disposition was enormously 
strengthened by a letter from James in which, with his usual blundering 
impolicy, he adopted a high-handed and threatening tone instead of re- 
cognising the necessity for conciliation. Dundee and the Jacobites withdrew 
from the Convention, which proceeded to appoint a committee on the analogy 
of the Lords of the Articles, consisting of eight of the nobility, eight bur- 
gesses, and eight of the barons or gentry of the shires. This committee 
directed and formulated the further proceedings of the Convention. 

The Convention in England, while it transferred the Crown from James 
to William, did not in theory effect a revolution of the constitution. Osten- 
sibly it reaffirmed and safeguarded constitutional doctrines which had been 
set at nought by absolutist innovations. It was not so with the Scottish 
Convention, which went a long way towards asserting for Scotland these 
same English constitutional claims which in Scotland had never subsisted 
either in theory or in practice ; and in some respects it went beyond the 
English formulary. It drew up a Claim of Right corresponding to the 
English Declaration of Right ; but instead of claiming that James had 
abdicated the throne by his flight it affirmed that James had forfeited 
the Crown, and, further, it asserted that prelacy, being opposed to the 
will of the people, ought to be suppressed. Its determination to claim 
a constitution approximating to the English model was expressed by the 
denunciation of the system of appointing the Lords of the Articles by any 
other process than the free election of the members by the Estates, where- 
as the Stuart system required first the nomination by the peers of eight 
bishops who were inevitably king's men, the nomination by the eight bishops 
of eight peers who, in the circumstances, would also obviously be king's men, 
and the selection of the rest of the Lords of the Articles by this united 
group of king's men. Thus the Stuart system had in effect given entire 
control of legislation to the king and the Privy Council ; the new system 



THE REVOLUTION 515 

would practically give it to the Estates. On these terms the crown was 
offered to and accepted by William, and the Convention was converted into 
a parliament. 

Dundee escaped from the South and raised the Jacobite standard in the 
Highlands, while William appointed to the command in Scotland General 
M'Kay, an efficient though not brilliant officer who had served under him 
in Holland. Five and forty years earlier Montrose had shown what 
could be done and had learnt what could not be done by an army 
composed of the clansmen. Among the mountains especially such 
an army could move with extraordinary speed which regular troops 
could not hope to match. In the shock of onset the charge of the 




The Parliament House, Edinburgh, in the 17th century. 
[From an engraving by Gordon of Rothiemay about 1650.] 

Highlanders was apt to be irresistible. But the commander of the mixed 
force was certain to find himself hampered if not paralysed by clan feuds 
and rivalries which even at the most critical moments it was almost impos- 
sible to repress, especially as the clans formed separate contingents, each led 
by its own chief. But, further, the Highlander conceived of war not as 
campaigning but as raiding ; after a fight or two he was disposed to con- 
sider himself at liberty to return to his glens with his booty. With such 
forces much damage might be inflicted on an enemy, but with such forces 
alone an organised campaign of conquest was not practicable. Dundee's 
hope was that he would be able to keep the Lowlands in a state of per- 
petual alarm and to demoralise the government troops until he should 
receive reinforcements from France or from Ireland which would enable 
him to conduct an effective campaign. 



516 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The failure of this hope when the summer was already far advanced made 
it imperative that Dundee should effect some striking achievement in order 
to keep his forces from dissolving. Accordingly he enticed M'Kay into the 
Highlands, drew his force into an ambush at the Pass of Killiecrankie, and 
put it completely and overwhelmingly to rout. Nevertheless his brilliant 
victory proved a fatal disaster to the Jacobite cause. Dundee himself fell 
while leading a triumphant charge. There was no man to take his place. 
The victorious clansmen attacked Dunkeld ; but being there repulsed by 
the resolute resistance of a regiment of Cameronians, they lost heart and 
interest and dispersed to their own homes. The civil war was practically 
at an end. 

The war being disposed of, there remained three problems for the 
government — the settlement of the Highlands, the settlement of the powers 
of parliament, and the settlement of the ecclesiastical question. All of them 
were thorny. The parliament demanded that the Committee of the Articles 
should be entirely elected by the Estates. The Crown, through its ministers 
and its own representative or commissioner, the Duke of Hamilton, claimed 
that the ministers should themselves form one of the groups in the com- 
mittee ; and neither party would give way. On the Church question the 
parliament wanted to restore the independent government of the Church 
on the Presbyterian system. The Crown, on the other hand, was determined 
to uphold the supremacy of the State over the Church, and also, not without 
reason, feared that Presbyterian supremacy would be intolerant and retalia- 
tory. All that was accomplished in 1689 was the passing of an Act 
abolishing Episcopacy. During the winter, however, some of the leaders of 
the opposition to the Crown discredited themselves by entering upon in- 
trigues with the Jacobites, and, on the other hand, William resolved to make 
substantial concessions. Accordingly in the following year the old Com- 
mittees of the Articles were finally abolished. Future committees were to 
be appointed by the Estates, but their appointment was not to be a con- 
dition precedent on legislation ; and while ministers of the Crown had the 
right of attending such committees, they had no right as ministers to vote. 
Another Act established the Presbyterian system of Church government 
with the Kirk Sessions as its base and the General Assembly as the apex. 
William's concessions secured his position as against Jacobitism, but practic- 
ally the Scottish parliament and the Scottish Church had won their demands 
at the expense of what had hitherto been the royal prerogative. 

For the settlement of the Highlands the policy adopted combined con- 
ciliation with compulsion. The advocates of military control were allowed 
to establish a government fort and garrison at Fort William ; but although 
for some time many of the Highland chiefs refused to take the oath of 
allegiance, the disappearance of all chance of help either from Ireland or 
from France disposed them to come to terms. Some accepted a solatium, 
and when in August 169 1 amnesty was promised to all who should take 
the oath of allegiance by the first of January ensuing, all of them took 



THE REVOLUTION 517 

advantage of the promise, although many deferred doing so till the last 
moment. 

Nevertheless in one case the submission came too late. Sir John 
Dalrymple, the Master of Stair (that is the heir-apparent of the Earl of 
Stair), one of William's principal advisers with regard to Scottish affairs, 
found an opportunity for destroying the small clan of the Macdonalds of 
Glencoe. The chief had presented himself, on the last day allowed by the 
law for taking the oath, at Fort William, where there was no authority em- 
powered to receive it. Hence he did not actually take the oath before a 
duly constituted authority till a week too late. The Edinburgh authorities 
refused to accept the oath thus tendered, and Macdonald's name was re- 
turned to London as a recalcitrant. Of these circumstances William and 
possibly Dalrymple were unaware ; and Dalrymple procured from the king 
an order that " this set of thieves " should be " extirpated." To carry out the 
order a party of soldiers was sent to Glencoe, whose commander was con- 
nected by marriage with the chief's family. Their hostile intentions were 
carefully concealed ; they were received and entertained hospitably by the 
clan for a fortnight. Then in the night they rose upon their entertainers 
and massacred them, though some few of the intended victims succeeded in 
making their escape. 

The act deservedly aroused furious resentment ; the punishment of the 
perpetrators was demanded on all hands ; and the inadequacy of the 
penalties inflicted after the whole story of the crime was revealed left a 
rankling sentiment of bitterness in Scotland against the system which kept 
the king of Scotland at a distance from the realm and out of touch with 
the Scottish people. William's ignorance of the facts connected with the 
tendering of the oath, an ignorance which may or may not have been 
shared by the Master of Stair, might have been held to excuse him if his 
subsequent conduct had not endorsed the whole of the proceedings. Stair 
had to resign his office, but William did not withdraw from him his personal 
favour. The memory of the massacre of Glencoe remained among the 
Scottish people as one of the incentives to Jacobitism and to the popular 
dislike at least of any closer connection with England. 



IV 

WILLIAM'S WAR 

During the four summer months of 1690 when William was in Ireland, 
signalised by the defeat of Beachy Head and the victory of the Boyne, the 
queen was left to conduct the administration in England. The period 
was critical, but Mary passed through the ordeal successfully. The king, 
on his return, was eager to hasten to Holland to concert plans for the 
future with his continental allies, for which it was of the utmost importance 



5 i8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

that he should be able to rely on the support of England. Parliament, 
meeting for an autumn session, voted large supplies with a readiness which 
augured well for the future, and William was able to leave for Holland in 
January, undeterred by the discovery of a Jacobite plot, the investigation 
of which was left to his wife. It was not an assassination plot, but aimed 
at the restoration of James on conditions which would probably have 
proved acceptable neither to James himself nor to the French king. Lord 
Preston, an ex-minister of James who gave his name to the conspiracy, was 
condemned to death, but was ultimately pardoned. Only one of the plotters 
was actually executed, and some were never brought to trial. For this 
leniency William himself was responsible, as he reappeared in England for 
three weeks. 

The campaigning in the Netherlands with which he was largely occu- 
pied during the ensuing period was of a dreary and unprofitable descrip- 
tion, neither the French nor the allies gaining any material advantages. 
But the fact of primary importance to England, so far as the war was 
concerned, was that France was wholly absorbed in the military operations, 
and was thereby prevented from adopting the energetic naval policy which 
might have been anticipated after Beachy Head. England, on the other 
hand, concentrated her efforts mainly on naval reorganisation. Never- 
theless Louis and James devised a scheme of invading England in 
1692. 

So many of the leading men in England, including Admiral Russell 
who was now at the head of the English Navy, were in correspondence 
with the Jacobites, that James suffered from an illusory conviction that 
the majority of Englishmen were in favour of his restoration. He issued 
a proclamation granting a general pardon, from which certain prominent 
persons were specially excluded, which only made it the more imperative 
that the men whose names were not excluded should emphatically demon- 
strate their loyalty to William. This document was so obviously useful 
to the government that instead of endeavouring to suppress it they pub- 
lished it broadcast. Nothing could have served better to bring the whole 
nation into line, and, above all, the fleet was put on its mettle. 

A large army of invasion was collected in Normandy, and Tourville, 
the victor of Beachy Head, took the seas to clear the Channel, with posi- 
tive orders to fight the English fleet on the first opportunity. In obedience 
to those orders he fought the battle of La Hogue. His fleet was scattered 
after hard fighting, and a dozen men-of-war which ran themselves aground 
under the guns of La Hogue itself were cut out by boats under the com- 
mand of Sir George Rooke, and were burnt down to the water under 
the eyes of James himself, who was an impotent witness of the catastrophe. 
This great victory virtually annihilated the French sea-power, which two 
years before had threatened the ascendency of England. From that hour 
England remained decisively the mistress of the seas ; for her only rivals 
were the Dutch, and with them she was in -constant alliance until the 



THE REVOLUTION 519 

smaller country had fallen gradually but completely behind her in the 
maritime race. 

The triumph of La Hogue was somewhat obscured by the failure to 
follow it up with effective blows and also by the defeat of William at 
Steinkirk. William was one of those commanders who rarely won a 
victory in the field, yet possessed a marvellous skill in preventing the enemy 
from turning a defeat to account. The French General Luxemburg 
gained little by Steinkirk, but English public opinion was irritated because 
the English troops which had borne the brunt of the fight were badly cut 
up, and for this some of William's Dutch officers were held to blame. 

So when William returned to England for the winter he found a 
parliament ill content and murmuring of grievances. Nevertheless the 
necessity for continuing the war was paramount ; the attacks on the 
government were defeated, and William obtained the required supplies. 
The two exceedingly important measures by which this end was achieved 
will be discussed in the ensuing chapter. Here it will suffice to explain 
that the first was a new assessment of the Land-tax, which became the 
principal source of revenue, and the second was the creation of the 
National Debt, a system of borrowing for national purposes, and (in the 
first instance) spreading the repayment over a term of years in the form of 
annuities to the lenders. 

Again, in 1693, the war went unsatisfactorily. William was again defeated 
at Neerwinden or Landen, though again the French victory was barely won 
and was of little immediate service. England, however, suffered a serious 
blow. A great merchant fleet, English and Dutch, known as the Smyrna 
Fleet, assembled to sail for Smyrna and the Levant. In spite of the great 
naval preponderance won at La Hogue, an insufficient escort was provided. 
Off the Spanish coast the Smyrna fleet was assailed by the French Navy, 
which had concentrated in the Mediterranean. The odds were so over- 
whelming that the escort had no choice but to take refuge in flight, and 
the entire merchant fleet of four hundred vessels was either captured or 
wrecked. 

This disaster had a somewhat curious consequence. Hitherto William 
had held fast to his principle of employing ministers from both parties, 
being extremely anxious not to identify himself either with Whigs or with 
Tories, although in many respects the Whig interests were more closely 
allied with his own. He had been particularly anxious not to part with 
Nottingham, a Tory in whose honesty he had great confidence. Anta- 
gonism between Nottingham and Russell had made it impossible to retain 
both in the ministry, and Russell had been removed from the Admiralty. 
The failure of the Admiralty produced an insistent demand for Russell's 
reinstatement, which necessitated the retirement of Nottingham ; and 
William at last made up his mind to form a Whig ministry and thus to 
initiate the system of party government. This device is attributed to the 
counsels of Sunderland, who, although he had been excluded from the Act 



520 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of Grace, had been allowed to return to England and had been received to 
some extent into William's favour, although not admitted to office. The 
division of parliament into two great parties was, as we saw, a product of 
the latter years of Charles II., but it caused no immediate change in the 
old system by which the king chose his ministers as he thought fit, without 
reference to the Legislature. To no one was it obvious that if the adminis- 
tration and the parliament were to be in agreement the ministers them- 
selves must be in harmony with the majority in the House of Commons> 
and must therefore be members of the party which held the majority in 
that Chamber. For it was still the theory that policy was directed by the 
king and that the ministers were the men chosen by him to carry out not 
their ideas but his. They were counsellors no doubt by whose advice his 
ideas might be modified, but it was their business to do what the king 
wished them to do. If they disagreed they were none the less supposed 
not to resign but to obey ; if they failed they were dismissed. There was 
no collective responsibility ; each man was directly responsible to the king 
for his own doings. It was only in the reign of Charles II. that it had been 
claimed that the minister was responsible not only to the king but to 
parliament. The fact that a Whig majority in one parliament gave way to 
a Tory majority in the next was no reason, on these principles, why the 
king should change his ministers, though he might find it necessary to 
modify his policy in order to avoid a deadlock. 

Now at this early stage the rule of selecting ministers from one party 
presented itself merely as a matter of practical convenience, the outcome 
of the division of parliament on party lines which itself was hardly twenty 
years old. In course of time it came to mean that the policy of the 
Crown must be the policy advocated by ministers as a body, and that must 
be a policy supported by the party as a whole from which the ministerial 
body was selected ; ministers became the medium for imposing upon the 
Crown the policy approved by the majority in parliament. But at the 
outset ministers appeared to be the medium through which the .majority in 
parliament was to be induced to support the policy of the Crown. So 
much was this felt to be the case that for a long time to come there was 
a strong sentiment in favour of excluding office-holders under the Crown 
from the House of Commons in order that the Crown might not exercise 
undue influence on that body. To this now antiquated sentiment is due 
the rule that a member of parliament being appointed to office under the 
Crown must seek re-election. 

The plain fact was that at the end of 1693, William, though he very 
much disliked the idea of placing himself in the hands of the chiefs of one 
party, still saw the necessity for having on his Council a body of men who 
would work in harmony together, and of having the solid support of one 
great party in the face of the great war on the continent. Later, when 
the war was over, he sought tp revert to the principle of taking ministers 
from both sides. But now he had to chose one party or the other, and the 




The Fleet Prison in the 17th century. 

[From a print of 1691.] 



521 



522 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

balance was definitely in favour of the Whigs. Both Whigs and Tories, as he 
knew, were intriguing with the Court of St. Germain ; but while many of the 
Tories were Jacobites at heart, the Whigs intrigued mainly as an insurance 
against accidents ; they did not want to see James back, but they wanted to 
secure a locus standi in case he should chance to come back. The Whigs 
were more definitely in favour of the war ; and this was what William had 
most of all at heart. The Admiral in whom the country had most confi- 
dence was a Whig. If Marlborough, who was reckoned as a Tory, had 
been trusted by the king, he might have counterbalanced Russell ; but 
William knew too well that the brilliant soldier was not to be trusted. The 
result was that in the ministry of 1693 the only Tories retained in office were 
Danby and Godolphin. The changes had a beneficial effect on the temper 
of the House of Commons, which granted adequate supplies, and the 
financial reforms of the reign were crowned by the creation of the Bank 
of England. 

The campaigning in the Netherlands in this year was uneventful. With 
the combatants so equally matched as they were, it was becoming more 
and more obvious that the victory in the long run would fall to the side 
whose treasury held out longest ; and the strain was already becoming too 
severe for Louis. A joint naval and military expedition against Brest met 
with disaster, attributed almost with certainty to the treachery of Marl- 
borough, though information of the design had reached the French from 
other sources as well. The military command was given to Talmash, the 
only English soldier with a reputation which at that time rivalled Marl- 
borough's ; and jealousy of Talmash is generally supposed to have been the 
motive of Marlborough's treachery. Talmash was killed before Brest, but 
Russell was despatched with a fleet to the Mediterranean where the French 
fleet took shelter at Toulon. In spite of his own protests, the English admiral 
was ordered to winter in the Mediterranean, with the result that naval 
action on the part of the French was completely paralysed, and the control 
of the inland sea became a permanent feature of English naval policy. 

Altogether, when William met parliament at the end of the year, the 
progress of the war was more satisfactory than at any of the earlier stages 
except immediately after La Hogue. King and parliament found them- 
selves harmoniously disposed, and William was at last persuaded to accede 
to the favourite demand of the Whigs, a Triennial Act, which required not 
only that parliament should meet at least once in three years, but that the 
life of a parliament should not extend beyond three years. The Whigs 
gained too by the retirement of Danby, now Duke of Leeds, consequent 
upon charges of corruption in connection with the East India Company. 
The charges could not be actually proved, but, on the other hand, Danby 
was not able to clear himself ; too much suspicion attached to him to 
allow of his continuing to take an active part in politics. 

Before Danby's fall William had suffered a very serious blow both 
politically and personally by the death of Mary. Tories who had been able 



THE REVOLUTION 523 

to reconcile themselves to the joint rule of King James's eldest daughter and 
her husband found it less easy to reconcile their consciences to the solitary 
rule of William. She, moreover, had been personally popular- William 
might inspire admiration and respect, but he had no hold on the affections of 
the English people. Moreover, he had always been able to trust the control 
of affairs to the queen during his own absence on the continent ; there was 
now no one in whom he could repose a like confidence. 

Again, however, it was fortunate that the campaigns of the following 
summer told heavily in William's favour. The value of the English control 
of the Mediterranean was manifested, since practically the whole of the 
French fleet was shut up at Toulon ; and William himself, as well as the 
English troops with him, won a new prestige by the recapture of the 
important town of Namur, which the French had taken in the first year 
of the war. 

As a natural consequence the dissolution of parliament and a general 
election brought a considerable accession of strength to William and the 
Whigs. But though the king's hands were strengthened for the purposes 
of the war, the Whigs themselves became more insistent upon party 
demands which were not to the king's liking. William was obliged to 
cancel large grants which, he had made to his most intimate friend and 
adviser, the Dutchman Bentinck, now Duke of Portland, who, like all 
William's Dutch companions and servants, was the object of English 
jealousy. Somewhat reluctantly also he had to accept a Treasons Bill, 
which required not only that there should be two witnesses to some kind of 
treason, but two witnesses to any specific charge ; while in other respects it 
secured to the accused rights which we should now regard as elementary, 
but which had hitherto been denied ; so that there could be no repetition of 
the old scandals in connection with the Rye House Plot. 

A reaction in William's favour, however, was caused by the discovery of 
Barclay's plot for the assassination of the king, which had been tacked on to 
a plot for a French invasion. William was never vindictive, and indeed 
carefully avoided too close enquiry and too much knowledge of the persons 
concerned in plots against his person ; on this occasion he displayed his 
usual half-contemptuous leniency, but parliament and the public were 
stirred to an unwonted loyalty. As in the reign of Elizabeth plots had 
recoiled upon the head of Mary Stuart, so now plots recoiled upon the 
head of James II. ; and again, as in Elizabeth's reign, a National Association 
was formed for the defence of the king. The war however suffered, for the 
panic created by the alarm of invasion led to the recall of the Mediterranean 
fleet and the recovery of French ascendency in those waters. Savoy with- 
drew from the coalition, and France was relieved from any further fighting 
in Italy. 

Two other consequences of the plot are to be noted in England. One 
of the prisoners, Sir John Fenwick, revealed intrigues with the Jacobites, 
already known to and ignored by William, on the part of Shrewsbury, 



524 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Marlborough, and Godolphin. Marlborough had already been removed 
from public employment, although his intriguing ceased with the death of 
Mary, which ensured the succession of Anne, whom he could count upon 
controlling through his wife. Shrewsbury and Godolphin both resigned, 
Godolphin being the only member of the Tory party who had continued 
till this time to retain high office. A purely Whig ministry was thus 
brought to completion. The second consequence was that the Whigs 
themselves resorted to an Act of Attainder to prevent the escape of Fen- 
wick himself, since one of the two witnesses required by the law which they 
themselves had passed to bring about his condemnation had been bribed 
to leave the country. Although the Whigs were as loyal as ever in pro- 
viding supplies for the war, it dragged on ineffectively through 1696. 
Both sides in fact were exhausted and anxious for peace. Negotiations 
through the winter and the following spring bore fruit in the Treaty of 
Ryswick. For William the chief gain was his definite recognition as King 
of England by Louis XIV., who pledged himself to give no active support 
to the Jacobite cause, though he refused to deny his hospitality to the 
exiles. The treaty altogether was a demonstration that France could do 
no more than hold her own against a coalition which included England ; 
whereas, before the Revolution, when she could practically count upon 
the neutrality if not the support of England, every treaty had brought her 
a fresh accession of territory and strength. 

But the war had served as a binding force in English politics, and dis- 
integration followed upon the peace. 



V 
THE GRAND ALLIANCE 

William himself had no illusions on the subject of the peace. He 
regarded it as nothing more than a truce, certain to be followed before long 
by a renewal of the struggle with Louis. In spite of the treaty, therefore, 
he urged upon the parliament the necessity not only for a large naval 
expenditure, but also for the maintenance of a standing army of not less 
than thirty thousand men. 

There was no difficulty about the fleet ; the nation was thoroughly alive 
to the importance of maintaining naval supremacy. But Tories and Whigs 
alike regarded the standing army as being at the best a necessary evil in 
time of war, intolerable in time of peace. William, being his own Foreign 
Minister and relying for the conduct of foreign business on Portland and 
his Dutch associates rather than upon English statesmen, had failed to 
educate Englishmen up to his own views of continental affairs ; and the 
Whigs regarded the peace as a satisfactory opportunity for cutting down 
the army to a standard far below that which was needed to satisfy William. 



THE REVOLUTION 525 

They were, moreover, irritated by the fact that the king had at last openly 
admitted Sunderland to his counsels, and obviously gave more confidence to 
him than to the Whig leaders themselves. Even the retirement of Sunder- 
land only induced them so far to modify the proposals for disbandment as 
to allow the retention of a force of ten thousand men apart from the troops 
in Scotland and Ireland. 

But the Triennial Act now demanded a dissolution, while William's 
own continental plans called for his presence at The Hague. The king's 
constant absences from the country were inevitably unpopular, and his 
departure at this time had an unfavourable effect on the elections. The 
result was that ministers found thenu Ives faced by what was practically 
a Tory majority in the House of Commons. To William's intense disgust 
parliament resolved to reduce the army to seven thousand men, all of 
them English-born troops, which at once involved the withdrawal of the 
Dutch troops on whom William himself relied, and the exclusion of his 
favourite officers from military posts. So sore was the king that he was 
on the verge of resigning the crown of England. But he could not afford 
to sever the ties between England and Holland, though the only modifica- 
tion he could obtain was the admission to the army of naturalised English 
subjects as well as those who were English born. 

The Tories pushed their victory further by demanding and obtaining 
an enquiry into the distribution of the forfeited lands in Ireland. The 
Whig ministers no longer found themselves leading the House, and 
William began to replace some of them by Tories. The Irish Lands Bill 
is notable as the first instance of a device of the Commons for evading 
opposition on the part of the Lords, which came to be known as " tacking." 
The bill was made part of the bill granting the Land Tax. This being 
treated as a money bill, the Lords could not amend, though they might 
reject it ; and they could not afford to reject it, because to do so in effect 
meant the refusal of supplies. 

The attitude of the parliament remained continuously adverse. In the 
winter of 1699-1700 there were direct attacks upon Whig ministers; and 
the general principles of toleration, to which William and the Whigs 
were committed, were assaulted by new measures directed against Roman 
Catholics, to which reference has been made in an earlier section. In effect 
the penal code against -Catholics was applied in its main features in England 
as well as in Ireland. Its iniquity was only less apparent, because in 
England the papists were only a small minority, whereas in Ireland they 
formed four-fifths of the population. The enquiry into the Irish lands 
gave the Tories another handle against the king, since the distribution of 
the forfeited estates had been made in clear violation of the king's promises 
and in the interest of personal favourites. Again the method of tacking 
was employed to force through the House of Lords a bill for the resump- 
tion of the lands granted since the king's accession. The Lords attempted 
amendments, but the Commons took their stand on a resolution of the 



526 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Commons in 1678, which declared that the Lords had no power to amend 
a money bill. The Lords were now obliged to give way. A still more 
vigorous attack upon the Lord Chancellor Somers and the king's foreign 
advisers was stopped only by the prorogation of parliament. At the end 
of the year instead of being reassembled it was dissolved ; for a crisis had 
arrived in foreign affairs which made William prefer the chances of a new 
parliament to another meeting with the assembly which had proved so 
hostile. 

England in general cared little and knew less about the European prob- 
lem which absorbed the king of England. In a vague fashion the people 
were antagonistic to France ; also in a vague fashion they suspected their 
Dutch monarch of caring more for Dutch than for English interests, 
whereby there was bred in them a sort of reaction against the anti-French 

THE SPANISH SUCCESSION 
Philip III. 

! 

I I I 

Anne of Austria, Philip IV. Maria, 



m. Louis XIII. 



m. Emperor 
Ferdinand III. 



Lcuis XIV. = Maria Teresa. Charles II. Margaret = Emperor = (2) Eleanor 

Leopold of Neuberg. 



I I I 

Dauphin. Maria, Emperor Archduke 

m. Maximilian Joseph. (Emperor) 

of Bavaria. Charles VI. 



Burgundy. Philip V Electoral 

I Prince 

Louis XV. Joseph. 

sentiment, which had become active during the peace following the Treaty 
of Ryswick. Until that treaty William had consistently pursued the single 
policy of antagonism to France, but since that date he had rather taken the 
line of seeking an accommodation with Louis. The European problem 
was in truth one with which England had less direct concern than any 
other Power ; but it was on the point of plunging the world into a tre- 
mendous struggle, in which, as it happened, England played a very leading 
part. England as a matter of fact ultimately flung herself into the war 
with zeal, not because the country was passionately moved by any abstract 
political theories or any obvious interests at stake, but because Louis de- 
liberately stirred it to a frenzy of wrath against himself. Nevertheless it is 
necessary to seek to understand the complication of dynastic and other 
interests which brought the war upon Europe at large. 

The central question, then, was that of the inheritance of the Spanish 
dominion. The senior branch of the house of Hapsburg ruled over that 
dominion, while the junior branch was identified with Austria and the 



" 



THE REVOLUTION 527 

headship of the German Empire. Spain and the Empire had ceased to be 
united under one crown when Charles V. abdicated in 1556. Now, for 
the past century, the Spanish crown had descended in direct male line, 
but outside that actual line the claim to succession passed through the 
daughters of the kings of Spain. For generations the Austrian Hapsburgs 
had taken the eldest of the Spanish infantas as their brides. As there was 
no " Salic law" in Spain, this course would obviously secure the Spanish 
succession to an Austrian Hapsburg whenever a king of Spain should fail 
to leave a male heir of his body. But twice the rule had been broken. 
Both Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. had in their day married the eldest 
infanta, while the second infanta had been the bride of the Hapsburg. 
But in both cases, again, the Bourbon marriage, but not the Hapsburg 
marriage, had been accompanied by a renunciation of the Spanish suc- 
cession on the bride's part. Hence Leopold of Austria, emperor at the 
end of the seventeenth century, son of one infanta and husband of another, 
seemed entitled to claim the Spanish succession whether for himself or for 
the offspring of his marriage if the king of Spain, Charles II., should die 
without issue. 

But the complication did not end here. Louis, on the one hand, was 
able to put in a strong plea that his own wife's renunciation (though not 
his mother's) was legally invalid. Again, the offspring of Leopold's 
marriage had been a daughter, who married the Elector of Bavaria. But 
Leopold wanted the Spanish succession to pass to his own second son by 
a later marriage, and therefore his daughter renounced her own claim on 
condition that the Netherlands should be handed over to her husband and 
their offspring. This, again, was a renunciation which had no legal validity 
at all ; but it will be seen that there were thus three possible claimants 
to the succession, since there was no possibility whatever that the king of 
Spain, Charles II., would leave an heir of his body. These were Leopold's 
grandson, the Electoral Prince of Bavaria — a child born in 1792 ; Leopold 
himself or the son whom he had nominated in his own place, the Archduke 
Charles ; and a grandson of Louis XIV. Nor could the question be settled 
among them by merely legal arguments, technicalities as to the more or less 
questionable validity of particular renunciations. The Spanish dominion in- 
cluded not only Spain itself and the American Empire, but also the Nether- 
lands, the kingdom of Naples, and certain Italian duchies. Europe could not 
allow this great dominion to become a mere appendage either of France or 
of Austria, although Spain itself would certainly be fiercely opposed to any 
disruption of the Spanish Empire. 

It appeared then that here was a matter for settlement by treaty. The 
European balance would be best served by the accession of the Electoral 
Prince of Bavaria to the Spanish dominion, and this had the advantage 
also that his title seemed on the whole the strongest. But the other 
claimants would not withdraw without receiving a substantial solatium. On 
this basis, William and Louis on their own account made the first Partition 



528 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Treaty. Austria and France were to get their solatium in Italy, and other- 
wise the Spanish Empire was to go to the Electoral Prince. The English 
ministers were not consulted, nor was the matter brought before parliament. 
Ministers simply gave an unqualified assent to William's bargain. 

But then the bargain itself was nullified by the death of the Electoral 
Prince. William did not want to see the Spanish Empire handed over to 
Leopold of Austria, but still less did he wish to see it handed over to Louis 
XIV. Louis, however, was again ready to make his bargain with the mari- 
time Powers, since he did not wish to fight for his maximum claims against 
a European coalition. He was moderate enough, and was prepared practic- 
ally to content himself with the Italian territories, leaving the rest to the 
Archduke Charles. On these terms William and Louis came to an agree- 
ment known as the Second Partition Treaty ; but when it was submitted to 
Leopold he refused to accede to it. 

This was the situation at the beginning of 1700 ; but it was once more 
turned upside down by the action of Spain. The Spaniards were furious 
at any scheme of partition. The dying King Charles made his choice 
between the Hapsburg and the Bourbon in favour of the Bourbon. He 
named as legitimate heir to the whole of his dominion Philip, the second 
son of the French Dauphin, since it was recognised in Spain as well as 
elsewhere that the actual crowns of Spain and France were not to be 
united. If Philip's elder brother should die without heirs then the crown 
of Spain was to be transferred to his younger brother, and only if he suc- 
ceeded to the French throne should it pass to the Archduke Charles, the 
Hapsburg claimant. Having made his will in these terms Charles died. 

Now William took for granted that this will would merely be used to 
force Leopold into acceptance of the Partition Treaty. To his intense in- 
dignation Louis immediately tore up the treaty and took his stand upon 
the will, claiming the entire Spanish inheritance for his grandson. In 
William's eyes this meant that for all practical purposes the policy of the 
Spanish Empire would be directed by Louis ; and that was a consumma- 
tion which must be averted at all costs. He could have carried the Whigs 
with him, but now the Tories were dominant ; therefore he dissolved 
parliament. But he apparently gained nothing by the dissolution, for in the 
new parliament the Tories retained their preponderance. It was absolutely 
necessary to conciliate the Tories, and to educate them over to his point 
of view. Godolphin returned to the ministry, which was also joined by 
Rochester. 

The first business of the new parliament was to secure the course of 
the succession. Anne would of course follow William on the throne, but 
the last of her numerous children had just died, and the succession after 
her had been left indefinite. Parliament proceeded to pass the Act of 
Settlement, which nominated as Anne's heir the Electress Sophia of Hanover 
and her offspring. But the new Act of Succession or Act of Settlement 
included also a series of clauses dealing with constitutional matters which 



THE REVOLUTION 529 

had been left over by the Bill of Rights. The king's dangerous control of 
the courts and judges was finally abolished by the enactment which made 
judges irremovable except on an address from both Houses. In view of 
the prospect that the throne of England would be occupied by German 
princes, it was enacted that the sovereign must be not only a Protestant 
but a member of the Church of England ; that he must not leave the 
country without consent of parliament ; that England was not to be in- 
volved in war for the defence of foreign territories ; and, finally, that only 
English-born subjects could be admitted to parliament, to public offices, 
civil or military, or to the Privy Council. The king's acceptance of the 
Act of Settlement had an extremely mollifying influence, which was shown 
by the resolutions of the Commons promising their support in his foreign 
policy. 

But in the meanwhile Louis had been helping William to convert the 
country by the openly aggressive character of his proceedings ; and the 
popular conversion was hastened by the captious conduct of the Tories in 
parliament, who seemed more intent upon impeaching the Whig leaders than 
on considering national interests. From the county of Kent there came a 
petition which was practically a censure of the Tory majority and an expres- 
sion of confidence in the king. The indignant House treated this as a 
breach of privilege, and sent the gentlemen who had presented the petition 
into custody ; but this, to the country, appeared only to be an interference 
with the right of petitioning, and a series of addresses after the Kentish 
model poured in. 

With his hands thus strengthened, and with Marlborough, who had at 
last been restored to his confidence, as his principal lieutenant both for 
diplomatic and for military purposes, William's negotiations for a new Grand 
Alliance progressed not unfavourably. But once again it was Louis who 
deliberately gave William the one thing that he most wanted. In September 
James II. died at St. Germain. By his deathbed Louis pledged himself to 
recognise young James Edward Stuart as king of England. James II. was 
no sooner dead than Louis XIV. publicly acknowledged King James III. 
Through that act the current of public opinion, already setting steadily in 
William's favour, became a rushing tide. William seized his moment and 
again dissolved the parliament. 

It was true that when the new assembly met there was a single-figure 
majority of nominal Tories in the Commons, but half the Tories themselves 
were already converts as far as the war was concerned. The new House 
not only pronounced it treason to hold commerce with the prince who now 
called himself James III., while outside the Jacobite circles he was known as 
the il Pretender " (a term properly applicable to any person claiming a title 
held de facto by somebody else) ; it also voted forty thousand men for the 
Army and the same number for the Navy. A clause was inserted in the 
terms of the Grand Alliance by which the allies undertook to make no treaty 
with France until she gave England satisfaction on this head. 

2 L 



53 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

William's patience had won. A great coalition had been formed against 
Louis, in which England had at last become not merely an auxiliary but a 
principal. But it was left to another to carry on his work. William's health 
had always been feeble, and had constantly threatened to break down under 
the tremendous strain of toil and responsibility. The shock of a fall from 
his horse and a broken collar-bone proved too much for his wrecked con- 
stitution. On March 9, 1702, Anne, the last of the Stuart sovereigns, 
became Queen of England. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE CENTURY 

I 

COLONIAL EXPANSION 

When James VI. of Scotland became also James I. of England his actual 
dominion did not include a single acre of soil outside the British Isles. 
Ninety-nine years later, when William III. died, the whole of the North 
American seaboard between the French Acadia on the North and the 
Spanish Florida on the South was occupied by British colonists. Still 
farther north, beyond the French Canada, England claimed possession of 
the Hudson Bay territory or Prince Rupert's Land. Also she was in 
possession of sundry islands, and the East India Company had established 
a footing ort the Indian Peninsula. Her colonial system was in full play, 
and her Indian Empire was in the germ. 

The conception of an Imperial England overseas had been born in the 
brains of Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh while the Virgin Queen 
still sat on the throne of England and the world still counted Spain, which 
had annexed the Portuguese Empire, mistress of the seas. But Raleigh's 
attempts to found the colony which he called Virginia had failed woefully. 
The Elizabethans were still too eager in the pursuit of short cuts to wealth. 
Those who were venturesome preferred preying upon Spanish galleons to 
settling down to a toilsome battle with nature in new lands which produced 
no gold nor silver nor precious stones. But, as in ancient days, the Dane, 
baulked of his robbing propensities, sought to satisfy his greed of gain by 
commerce, the Englishman, when he could no longer spoil the Spaniard, 
bethought himself of turning the New World to commercial account. 

In 1606 a commercial company was formed, which procured a charter 
for the colonisation of Virginia ; for, after a vague fashion, England had 
asserted a claim to the territories which lay north of the Spanish posses- 
sions. The company was granted what were practically sovereign rights 
over a vast and undefined region (subject to the English crown). The 
company's settlement at Jamestown formed the nucleus of the colony of 
Virginia. Here there was no native empire to be subdued, such as the 
Spaniards had found in Mexico and Peru, or such as that which dominated 
India. The native tribes were elevated only a degree above barbarism ; 

S3i 



532 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

they knew no cities, were still half nomadic, and had no political organisa- 
tion higher than that of the tribe. But such an experiment as this of the 
English had no precedent in the world's history. The Greeks had planted 
city states on the Mediterranean shores among peoples for the most part 
akin to themselves or already possessing an elaborate civilisation. The 
Romans had not colonised but had planted garrisons. The Spaniard 
treated his conquests in America as estates of the Crown occupied by garri- 
sons who exploited the mineral 
X^J^Sv. wealth of the land for the 

benefit of the Crown. But the 
Englishman went out to make 
for himself a new home in a 
new land, to acquire com- 
petence or wealth by the 
methods with which he was 
familiar in the old home ; and 
he carried with him his tradi- 
tional ideas of liberty and self- 
government. 

The first settlers narrowly 
escaped the fate of Raleigh's 
colonists. But for the vigour 
and abilities of one of their 
leaders, Captain John Smith, 
they would have been wiped 
out in their collisions with the 
native Red Indians, so named 
because it was still believed 
that the New World was a 
portion of the Indies. Ex- 
perience was needed to teach 
the practical principle that the 
colony would best serve the 
commercial objects of its founders if the colonists were left in the main to 
manage their own affairs with the minimum of interference from home. 
In 1623 the colonists were granted a constitution which vested the govern- 
ment in the hands of a nominated Governor and Council and an elected 
Assembly of " burgesses." The business of the colony was not merely to be 
self-supporting, but to develop the products of the country suitable for 
export, notably tobacco, in exchange mainly for manufactured goods. A 
large proportion of the settlers were younger sons of the English gentry, 
of the landowning class, Church of England men, of the type which was 
presently to recruit the ranks of the Cavaliers. The climatic conditions 
and the character of the work to be done favoured the employment of 
slave labour and the importation of negro slaves began in 1620, to be 




[From his 



John Smith at 37. 
'General History of Virginia, 



1624.] 



THE CENTURY 533 

supplemented afterwards by criminals or quasi-criminals, who were trans- 
ported to the plantations as slaves for a term of years. 

The enterprise of the Virginia Company was followed by one of an 
altogether different type, when a group of Nonconformists sailed in the 
Mayflower from Plymouth in 1620 and founded the first of the New 
England Colonies. The motive of the Pilgrim Fathers was to find new soil 
where they might follow religion after their own fashion, and they were 
followed by others like-minded with themselves, although these Northern 
Colonies were divided, like the Puritans at home, between those which were 
rigidly Presbyterian and those which favoured Independency and toleration. 
Here the conditions approximated more nearly to those of the English 
agricultural districts and towns. They drew to them Puritan gentry, 
burghers, and yeomen. There was no demand for slave labour, nor did the 
soil grow products for export as in the South ; while, on the other hand, 
the settlers were very much less dependent on manufactured goods from 
the Old World. 

Romanists as well as Puritans were allowed to seek free exercise of 
their religion in the New World ; and the primarily Romanist colony of 
Maryland was also of necessity tolerationist. This group, however, was 
much more nearly akin to the landowning classes of the South in origin 
than to the Puritans of the North, and planted itself in the neighbourhood 
of Virginia as the second plantation colony, not in the neighbourhood of 
the New England group. As a natural consequence the New Englanders 
were entirely in sympathy with the Roundheads when the Civil War broke 
out, while Cavalier sentiment prevailed in the plantation colonies which 
gave some trouble to the Commonwealth government. Meanwhile the 
English flag had already been set up in the Bermudas and the Bahamas, and 
in Cromwell's time the almost accidental seizure of Jamaica established 
England beside Spain in the West Indies. 

The habitual procedure on the creation of colonies was for a company 
or an individual to procure from the Crown a charter conveying the pos- 
session of certain territories upon conditions. Privileges were conceded, 
but rights were reserved to the Crown. There was no theory that the 
colony was a free state ; it was a community to which permission was given 
to settle itself and to go its own way, provided that its specific interests 
were always recognised as subordinate to those of the mother country. 
The powers of self-government varied according to circumstances ; that is, 
the powers of the elected Assembly, as compared with those of the 
Governor and Council, differed, mainly according to the nature of the body 
to whom the original charter was granted. 

On the North beyond the St. Lawrence the French made their province 
of Canada. The regions between the St. Lawrence and New England 
"were appropriated under James I., and named Nova Scotia in order to pro- 
vide colonising ground for the Scots. But the ground was inadequately 
occupied, and was claimed and colonised by the French under the name of 



534 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Acadia. More than once, during the Anglo-French wars, the theoretical 
sovereignty changed hands ; but it was not till 171 3 that the country was 
finally ceded to Great Britain. We have already observed that the Dutch 
at one time thrust in a wedge between the northern and the southern 
colonies of the English, and the continuity of the British seaboard from 
North to South was only completed with the cession of the Dutch colony 
at the Treaty of Breda. 

Pennsylvania was a colony created in the reign of Charles II. at the 
instance of the Quaker William Penn. This, too, was intended to provide 
a home for the persecuted members of the Society of Friends, though under 
conditions which required a general toleration. The Carolinas were an 
earlier product of the Restoration ; both Clarendon and Ashley were in 
the small group of the original " Proprietors." 

As a general rule the English government itself intervened very little 
in the affairs of the colonies. Under the Commonwealth Navigation, Act 
no difference was made between them and England itself. English, Scot- 
tish, Irish, and Colonial shipping were all on precisely the same footing. 
The Commonwealth was Imperialist in refusing to differentiate between 
different portions of the Empire, just as it sought for unification by uniting 
the parliaments of England, Scotland, and Ireland at Westminster. But 
with the Restoration the Particularists prevailed. The united parliament 
was dissolved, and the English parliament became exceedingly English ; 
that is, it sought the interests of England, however detrimental they might 
be to other portions of the Empire. The effects were felt by the colonies ; 
for the Navigation Act at the Restoration imposed restrictions upon colonial 
commerce for the benefit of English merchants. Colonial ships, it is true, 
counted as English ships; they could participate in the carrying trade. 
But no goods could be imported to the colonies except from an English 
port, nor might colonial goods be exported except in the first instance 
to an English port. This did not of course interfere with the trade be- 
tween England herself and her colonies ; but it required colonial commerce 
with all other countries, including Scotland and Ireland, to take England 
en route. Protectionist principles were presently carried still further, 
and the colonists were forbidden to export or even to manufacture goods 
which could compete in the market with English products. 



II 

THE TRADING COMPANIES 

The reign of Elizabeth saw the close of the long period of agricultural 
depression brought about largely by the conversion of tillage into pasture. 
That process ceased when the stage had been reached at which the profits 
of growing wool and of growing corn had become equalised. Something 



THE CENTURY 535 

was contributed to this end by the introduction of convertible husbandry, 
which increased the profits of tillage. Otherwise, however, there were 
no great improvements in the methods of farming ; enterprise on the part 
of the greater landholders was checked by the civil broils. But two 
features of the period had a specially favourable effect on the rural popu- 
lation. The Elizabethan Poor Law to a very great extent served the 
purpose with which it had been enacted, of providing relief for honest 
destitution and at the same time discouraging wilful idleness and vagabond- 
age. But besides this the substitution of the system of industrial regu- 
lation under the Statute of Apprentices for the old gild system made 
itself felt. It provided those whose substantive employment was agricul- 
tural labour with supplementary means of livelihood, because it allowed 
spinning to become a general cottage industry, while in many cases the 
farmer added weaving to his other employments. The Civil War was 
inevitably destructive, but its effects were hardly so injurious in England 
as those of the partisan struggles in France, and were in no way com- 
parable to the disastrous results produced in Germany by the Thirty 
Years' War. The general prosperity, in short, compared favourably with 
that of other nations ; and a further impulse was given to industrial 
development when the persecuting policy of Louis XIV. drove the highly 
skilled industrial population out of France and to a very great extent 
into England. The employments in which the expelled Huguenots ex- 
celled were not such as in the main brought them into direct competition 
with the English trades ; a colony of silk-weavers was established at 
Spitalfields without arousing native hostility. Coming immediately before 
the Revolution, at a moment when Englishmen were particularly ready 
to sympathise with persecuted Protestants, and when ideas of toleration 
were gaining ground, the French king's victims were sympathetically 
welcomed, and new industries were planted which soon became thoroughly 
acclimatised. 

The great development of the period, however, was commercial rather 
than industrial, and the main agencies by means of which the commercial 
extension was effected were the chartered companies of merchants which 
began to multiply in the later years of Queen Elizabeth. 

The general principle applied to these companies was one which had 
long been familiar in- the cases of the Merchants of the Staple and the 
Merchant Adventurers. A charter was given to an association of merchants 
conveying to them exclusive rights of trading in particular fields, with 
jurisdiction over their own members and large powers of independent 
action. During the sixteenth century the members of such companies 
traded on their own account as individuals, but were bound to obey the 
company's regulations. In the seventeenth century there came a new 
development which was in effect initiated by the East India Company, 
which had first received its charter on December 31st, 1600. At a quite 
early stage of its career this association converted itself into a joint-stock 



536 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

company ; that is to say, the members ceased to trade as individuals ; the 
company traded as a unit, distributing the profits of the trade among its 
members. The actual trading was done by the agents or servants of the 
company. Thus in whaf were called the Regulated Companies the associates 
were actually individual traders, trading under the guarantees of the whole 
body and bound by its regulations. In the Joint-Stock Companies the associates 
became simply shareholders, participating in the profits of the trade carried 
on by the company as a whole, while they themselves only controlled that 
trade in so far as they could control the election of the Board of Directors. 

Practically the whole of the trading with remote, barbarous, or semi- 
barbarous countries was appropriated to the companies, regulated or joint- 
stock ; for, as we have seen, the permanent communities or colonies over- 
seas were also planted in the first instance by chartered companies. The 
principle was obvious. In remote regions the Home Government could 
not undertake police business ; the trader must be left to protect himself 
not only against avowed pirates but against foreign rivals. He could not 
efficiently protect himself if his own countrymen were behaving in a law- 
less fashion. He could not make terms for himself and his countrymen 
with native potentates if others of his countrymen were not legally bound 
by those terms. Hence it was necessary to give to the company exclusive 
rights of trading and an indisputable authority over traders. 

In the importance ultimately achieved by their operations none of the 
great associations can be compared with the East India Company. For a 
century after the company received its first charter the great Mogul Empire 
in India was at the height of its splendour and power. The Moguls ruled 
unchallenged over all Northern India, though they had not brought the 
great kingdoms of the South into actual subjection. No one dreamed of a 
conquest of India like the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru. But, 
broadly speaking, the effect of the maritime rivalry now developing between 
Dutch and English — for the old Portuguese supremacy in the Eastern 
waters had already perished — was to make the Spice Islands on the South- 
East the Dutch sphere, while the English devoted themselves rather to the 
Indian Peninsula itself. The first footing was gained in 1612 when the 
British company was permitted to set up a trading establishment (called a 
" factory ") at Surat on the western coast. A second factory was conceded 
on the south-east coast at Madras, where the English quarter was known as 
Fort St. George. This was in 1639. The third, at Hugh on the Ganges 
delta, was granted in 1650 ; and this was afterwards shifted to Calcutta. 
The marriage of Charles II. to Catherine of Braganza brought, as a portion 
of the dower, the Portuguese possession of Bombay, which was transferred 
by the Crown to the East India Company, and took the position formerly 
occupied by Surat. The three factories at Bombay, Madras, and Hugli 
were the centres from which the three British Presidencies ultimately 
expanded ; but the company were merely tenants, not owners, except in 
the one case of Bombay. 



THE CENTURY 537 

During the last third of the seventeenth century the French entered the 
field as rivals of the English and Dutch. This was the era in which, under 
the influence of Colbert, France developed her greatest maritime energy, 
and the French East India Company was started in 1664. Hence in the 
ensuing century the French, not the Dutch, were the rivals who attempted 
to monopolise the Indian trade and dreamed of a European ascendency in 
India ; it was the French whose defeat gave to the British the ascendency 
which was gradually to expand into Empire. 







The old East India House. 
[Drawn from an old print by Herbert Railton.] 

But even in the seventeenth century there were Englishmen in India 
who were conscious of the instability of the Mogul Empire ; and a French 
observer expressed his own belief that a Turenne with twelve thousand men 
could conquer India. As a matter of fact that was very nearly what had 
been done by Babar, the founder of the Mogul Empire, when Henry VIII. 
was reigning in England. English governors, prematurely contemptuous 
of an empire which was as yet only on the verge of utter disintegration, 
ventured to levy war in support of their demand for the redress of griev- 
ances. The English factories would have been wiped off the face of India 
if the Emperor Aurangzib had not feared that English ships would cut off 
his faithful Mohammedan subjects from the pilgrimages to Mecca by which 



538 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

he and they set great store. This, not fear of English arms, induced the 
Mogul to deal magnanimously with the English, and to reinstate them at 
Calcutta after the Hugh factory had been destroyed. 

But the East India Company had other vicissitudes to pass through be- 
sides Dutch and French rivalry and quarrels with the native powers. Their 
monopoly was a grievance. Enterprising English merchants objected al- 
together to the principle of the joint-stock company ; they wanted to 
trade for themselves, and to secure for themselves the profits of their own 
enterprise and energy. They wanted Free Trade for the individual, and 
they struggled hard to break down the company's monopoly. The Com- 
monwealth government inclined to favour the view of the " interlopers," 
as they were called, and to treat their independent trading as legitimate. 
Cromwell, however, resisted the temptation to allow a rival company to set 
itself up. The view prevailed not that monopoly was in itself a thing de- 
sirable, but that under existing conditions it was a necessity. Only a mono- 
polist company would be able to exercise the sovereign functions which 
were required in dealing with native powers and foreign rivals. 

The theory found justification in the reign of William III., when a rival 
company was actually established under Whig auspices, the old company 
being associated with the Tories. This was in 1698. The Exchequer was 
in need of money. The company offered nearly three-quarters of a 
million to have its charter confirmed by parliament. The interlopers were 
ready to provide two millions if the subscribers were given the exclusive 
trade for thirteen years. The second offer was accepted, while the old 
company was allowed three years' grace to wind up its affairs. Before the 
three years were up a Tory parliament confirmed the old company's 
charter. The battle between the companies was so obviously and immedi- 
ately disastrous to both that in a very short time they were negotiating for 
a union ; and in the last days of 170 1 they were incorporated as a single 
company whose monopoly remained unchallenged for a century. 

The accepted commercial doctrine of the day was what is called the 
Mercantile Theory. It was the business of the State to direct commerce 
and industry into the channels which were regarded as best for the national 
welfare ; the theory of free competition was unheard of. The East India 
Company itself had much ado to preserve its existence, apart from the 
difficulties already referred to, because there was a very general belief that 
the East India trade was bad for the country, although highly profitable to 
the traders. The argument was that India did not buy English goods, 
while England bought Indian goods. Therefore what took place was an 
exchange of English gold for Indian goods, whereby England was drained 
of bullion. It was the universally accepted theory that a trade which took 
money out of the country was bad for the country. It was left for a later 
age to demonstrate that in the whole field of trade the balance adjusted 
itself automatically. The advocates for the company won its case with the 
public by the argument that although gold went out of the country to 



THE CENTURY 539 

India a large proportion of the goods for which it was exchanged were re- 
exported and exchanged again for gold at greatly enhanced prices, so that 
the net outcome of the Indian trade was an actual addition to the amount 
of gold in the country. 

On another side Protectionism and Retaliation both followed in prac- 
tice upon the mercantile theory. It was good to foster each English in- 
dustry, good to damage the industry of any neighbour who might become 
hostile, and good to damage any specific foreign industry which might com- 
pete with an English one. The influence of the mercantile community in 
parliament caused those principles to be applied not only to the countries 
of Europe but to Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies. Scotland could be 
dealt with only by tariffs, but Ireland and the colonies were subject to 
direct legislation from Westminster. The colonies probably did not suffer 
very greatly, for the simple reason that, if there had been no legislation at 
all, there would still only have been a very small market for such of their 
goods as came in competition with those of England. It was not so with 
Ireland, where the growing of wool was deliberately suppressed. Virtually 
the only industry permitted in that country, apart from agriculture, was the 
linen manufacture (vigorously encouraged by Strafford), which never became 
acclimatised in England ; and this was not the least of the reasons which 
kept Ireland in a miserable state of economic depression. 

Scotland, on the other hand, though it had gained economically by the 
commercial and political union under the Commonwealth, had not yet come 
to regard such commercial advantages as an equivalent for the loss of 
political independence. With the Restoration she reverted to the position 
of a foreign state. Her competing goods were shut out from the English 
market, and she was excluded from the benefits which English shippers 
derived from the Navigation Act. Although she was too poor to challenge 
the great English monopolies successfully on her own account, she 
attempted to do so, most conspicuously in the disastrous Darien Scheme. 
The Darien Company was formed to establish on the Isthmus of Darien a 
trading centre which was to rival the East India Company. The scheme 
failed to find financial support outside of Scotland itself, where it was taken 
up with unreasoning passion. The inevitable failure was attributed to the 
machinations of the English mercantile community and the political pres- 
sure brought to bear .upon foreign communities by William acting under 
their influence. The collapse of the Darien Scheme and the widespread 
ruin it involved were turned to account, like the Massacre of Glencoe, to 
intensify anti-English sentiment, though there were level-headed Scots 
who saw in it rather a strong argument for a Legislative Union with 
England which should make the two countries commercially equal. 



540 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



III 

NATIONAL FINANCE 

The system of national finance occupies a prominent position in the 
history of the seventeenth century, since for some three-fourths of the 
period it is a primary factor in the relations between the Crown and the 
parliament. It is at the very root of the constitutional struggle ; not 
because the people were afraid of being tyrannically taxed beyond endur- 
ance, not because they grudged money for public purposes, but because 
they recognised that the control of the purse ultimately entails the control 
of policy. But since this constitutional struggle is itself the leading feature 
of the period to a much greater extent than at any other time in our 
history, national finance in its connection with that struggle has already 
been dealt with and requires little further elucidation. In effect the out- 
come of the long fight was that the Restoration separated the personal in- 
come of the king from the public revenue of the kingdom which had 
hitherto been identified with it. The regular revenue was appropriated to 
particular objects, while for all other objects additional revenue had to be 
voted by parliament ; and in the course of the reign of Charles II. the 
principle was finally laid down of appropriating the expenditure to the 
specific object for which the supplies had been granted. 

Except in one particular the sources of supply remained the same as 
in the past. The parliamentary votes were concerned mainly with the 
" subsidies," to which each locality was called upon to contribute in pro- 
portions fixed by an exceedingly antiquated assessment. Variations in the 
duties at the ports were controlled not by the desire to increase revenue 
from that source, but to encourage or discourage particular trades. The 
one new source of revenue was the invention of the Long Parliament, or, 
more accurately, was borrowed by them from the Dutch. This was the 
excise, a tax primarily imposed upon the home production of alcoholic 
liquors. Unpopular as this novel tax was, it was too productive to be 
given up, although there was no further extension of its principles. 

But revenue had hitherto been provided on what may be called ready- 
money principles, on the hypothesis that the year's expenditure was to be 
met out of the year's revenue. Kings in the past had occasionally run 
heavily into debt, sometimes with disastrous results for the lenders, as in 
the case of Edward III. and Henry VIII., who met their difficulties by re- 
pudiating their obligations. But in general the Treasury borrowed only to 
meet the immediate expenditure which could not await the collection of the 
revenue ; when the revenue was collected the debts thus incurred were 
paid. In the days of the early Plantagenets the principal lenders had been 
the Jews ; when the Jews were expelled from England the kings borrowed 



THE CENTURY 541 

chiefly from the Lombards, at a later stage from the Germans, and 
then, with the great development of English wealth, from the London 
merchants and especially the goldsmiths. But the risks which still attended 
this method were demonstrated by the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672, 
when the Government suspended repayment to the goldsmiths. 

The Crown in the past had supplemented its revenues, much to the 
disgust of the general public, by the sale of monopolies. Private mono- 
polies were abolished before the Civil War, but the monopolies of the great 
companies were increasingly valuable sources of revenue. Thus we have 
seen the Government in 1698 
obtaining a couple of millions 
as the price for bestowing a 
monopoly on the new East 
India Company. Here, we 
may remark in passing, lies a 
striking difference between the 
English enterprises of this 
kind and those of France. The 
English company bought its 
privileges from the govern- 
ment by substantial subsidies ; 
the French company was a 
creation of the government, 
not of private enterprise, and 
was run by the government 
generally at a loss. 

But, in fact, England had 
entered upon a period of foreign wars, whose expenses the normal sources 
of revenue were not capable of meeting. The vigorous and impressive 
foreign policy of the Commonwealth had almost reduced it to bankruptcy. 
After the Restoration, the Dutch war, coupled with the gross misuse of 
the public funds, had so emptied the Treasury in 1667 that half the English 
fleet had to be laid up, and the Dutch sailed up the Medway. The 
determination to embark on another Dutch war brought about the Stop of 
the Exchequer in 1672. And when the Revolution sucked England into the 
vortex of the Europeari complications, it became increasingly impossible to 
meet the heavy demands for military and naval purposes out of an annual 
revenue derived from the established sources. 

The first remedy that presented itself was a revision of the old assess- 
ment of the land and property tax, which had become translated into the 
subsidy of .£70,000. As matters stood the relative taxable capacity of the 
different areas had changed enormously since the old assessment. Poor 
areas had become wealthy and wealthy areas had become poor. A formerly 
rich area which had become poor still paid its old proportion, and therefore 
reached the limit of endurance much sooner than a stationary area, while a 




A first-rate man of war of 1680. 
[From a print. ] 



542 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

poor district which had become rich was still only lightly burdened. The 
limit of taxing was set by the paying capacity of the most heavily burdened 
of these three groups. A redistribution of the burden under a new assess- 
ment would obviously enable a much larger revenue to be collected without 
hardship. So in 1692 a new assessment was made, under which it was 
estimated that a tax of one shilling in the pound would produce approxi- 
mately half a million. As a matter of fact the burden fell almost entirely 
upon the land, owing to the extreme difficulty of arriving at any tolerable 




The old Mercer's Hall, where the Bank of England was first established. 



assessment of the value of other kinds of property. From this time forward 
the land tax became the main source of revenue. 

But even when the land tax was as high as four shillings in the pound, 
when it produced a couple of millions, war expenditure outran the annual 
revenue. The land tax of four shillings in 1692 provided a million less 
than was required. The solution of the problem was found by Charles 
Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, in the creation of the National Debt. 
A loan of a million was invited, but the lenders, instead of being paid off at 
an early date, were to receive life annuities. Thus the annuity would be an 
annual charge on the Exchequer, steadily diminishing as the annuitants 
died off. Two years later the principle of borrowing was further extended 
by the creation of the Bank of England. The Government called for a 



i 



THE CENTURY 543 

loan of a million and a quarter. Interest was guaranteed on the amount, 
and was secured on an increase in the Customs. From the subscriber's point 
of view the subscription was simply an investment. He was certain of his 
interest, and if he wanted to recover his principal, he would have no diffi- 
culty in finding some one else willing to take his place. The subscribers 
were incorporated as the Bank of England, a company whose business was 
not commercial but exclusively financial. It is to be observed that the 
creation of the National Debt provided a powerful guarantee against the 
development of Jacobitism. The commercial classes, from whom most of 
the money was borrowed, inevitably felt that a Jacobite restoration might 
mean a repudiation of the National Debt. That fear kept the solid mass of 
vested interests on the side of the Protestant succession, and tended to keep 
it on the side of the Whigs, because the Whigs were more decisively bound 
to the Protestant succession than were the Tories, although the bulk of the 
Tories were by no means Jacobites. 

The real ease with which the country was able to bear an enormous 
financial strain without suffering was further demonstrated by the reform of 
the currency in 1696. The coinage had been deliberately and shamelessly 
debased in the twenty years preceding the reign of Elizabeth. Its restora- 
tion had been one of that queen's first measures ; and since that time the 
standard of the coins issued from the Mint had been maintained. But the 
coin in circulation had been clipped and defaced till most of it was very 
much below the face value. According to the recognised law, it was the 
debased coins that remained in regular circulation. The effect on foreign 
exchange was disastrous, and trade was hampered. Yet with the war 
actually in progress the Government faced the problem of calling in the 
defective coin and replacing it with a currency of full value and not liable of 
clipping. The whole cost was borne by the State. In spite of the great 
quantity of coin called in and the long time required for replacing it with 
the new coins, trade was not seriously disturbed. The moment was seized 
by the numerous enemies of the Bank of England to make an attempt to 
ruin that body. The goldsmiths bought up the Bank paper and presented 
it for payment in specie when the Bank cellars were drained. The Bank, 
however, treated the demand as a conspiracy, which it actually was, and re- 
fused payment, though it met all bona fide claims as fast as the Mint could 
provide it with money. The conspiracy defeated itself, and the Bank 
emerged from the crisis stronger than before. 

IV 

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 

The splendid virility of the Elizabethan era had displayed itself in an 
astonishing individual versatility typified in Walter Raleigh, who was 
equally fit to play the part of soldier, sailor, courtier, statesman, and man 



544 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of letters. It was an age in which one man could conceive and depict 
Falstaff and Lear, Nick Bottom and Hamlet, Rosalind and Cleopatra. Not 
so were the elements mixed in the age which followed. The abounding 
delight in the exuberance of life and the appreciation of life's seriousness, 
Paganism and Puritanism, parted company. Paganism captured the court 
and Puritanism dominated the country. Puritanism as a force in literature 
gave to the world of its best in Milton and Bunyan. Paganism achieved 
nothing higher than the dainty lyrics of Herrick and the brilliant depravity 

of the Restoration comedy. 
Even in the seventeenth 
century it is true that the 
world could not be divided 
into Puritans and Pagans ; 
but at no other period had 
the two principles been so 
openly at war ; and because 
they were so openly at war 
Puritanism assumed an ex- 
travagance of austerity, and 
Paganism an extravagance 
of wantonness, incompat- 
ible with consummate ar- 
tistic achievement. Only 
the supreme genius of 
Milton and Bunyan made 
them exceptions. Paganism 
produced no Aristophanes 
to set against them. 

It must be remembered, 
however, that the border- 




A bedroom parly of 163 1. 



land between the Elizabethan and the early Stuart literature lies not at the 
beginning but at the end of the reign of James I. ; that half of the " Eliza- 
bethan " drama was produced after the Union of the Crowns. And even 
when the generation of Elizabethans had died out, the hostility between 
Puritanism and Paganism was not by any means fully developed. The 
immediate severance was rather that between the intellectual and the 
emotional, which must unite in the production of the greatest literary work, 
especially poetry. The pursuit of verbal ingenuities and intellectual subtle- 
ties, which had in fact been heralded by the Euphuists, dominated the 
cultivated taste of the time and produced what a later age chose to call the 
" metaphysical " poets, at whose head was John Donne. The deeper feelings 
of men were concentrating upon religion and the passion for liberty, but 
they had not yet hardened into fanaticism. Comus is the consummate 
expression of the Puritanism which was at once spiritual and intellectual, 
neither Roundhead nor Cavalier but characteristic of much that was best 



THE CENTURY 545 

among the adherents of both sides when the Civil War broke out. It 
was the Civil War itself which taught Milton to identify the Royalists with 
the Philistines, and to allegorise the struggle of Puritanism in the Samson 
Agonistss; while the essential unconquerable spirit at the heart of English 
Puritanism, independent of all the turmoil of war and faction, still found 
its sublime expression in the Paradise Lost. 

In Milton alone the most intense Puritanism was wedded to the highest 
intellectuality. Consciously his appeal was to a " fit audience though few." 
John Bunyan represents the Puritanism which took captive the humble 
and unlearned through its own 
essential humility and simplicity. 
A man of the people, low born, 
with no social advantages, un- 
educated save for an intimate 
knowledge of the Scriptures 
and a considerable acquaintance 
with the controversial literature 
of Puritanism, John Bunyan 
followed the old advice of Sir 
Philip Sidney, " looked in his 
heart and wrote." The im- 
mortal allegory of the Pilgrim's 
Progress displays the root quality 
of Puritanism, not turned arro- 
gant by battling with the Devil, 
nor harsh by battling with the 
flesh, nor sour by the world's 
contempt and persecution. In- 
cidentally it gives a delightfully 
vivid impression of eternal human 
England of the Restoration. 




John Milton. 



under the conditions of the 
history of literature it stands 



types 
But in the 

out peculiarly as the precursor of the English novel which was about to be 
created by Daniel Defoe. 

The reign of King Charles I., the Civil War, and the rule of the 
Commonwealth were not favourable to literary production, except of a con- 
troversial character either political or religious. Pamphleteering flourished, 
but the lighter forms of writing could only be practised by those who were 
able to stand aloof altogether from the arena. Yet such peaceful spirits 
were to be found. There is nothing militant in the devotional prose of 
Jeremy Taylor or the devotional verse of George Herbert, the latter of 
whom lived to witness only the danger-signals of the storm, not the storm 
itself. There are few writers dearer to the true book-lover than Sir 
Thomas Browne, though not every one takes a genuine delight in the Religio 
Medici. Battles raged and kingdoms fell, but that did not prevent Isaac 
Walton from practising the most peaceful of recreations and writing the 

2 M 



546 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

fisherman's supreme classic, while Milton was deserting his diviner muse to 
produce the Areopagitica, a masterpiece in political prose literature. 

With the exception of Comus the great masterpieces of Puritan literature 
were actually produced after the Restoration. But the voices which pre- 
vailed were not those of Puritans. Milton was the survivor of an age of 
idealists, when men fought for causes with a splendid devotion, however 
antagonistic the causes themselves might be ; when they were ready to die 
for " Church and King " or for " the Houses and the Word." The old 
ideals had shattered themselves. The new age which had dawned was 

materialist and cynical. The past age had 
been too much in earnest to be clever and 
witty ; the new age was supremely clever 
and witty, being no longer in earnest. 
Therefore its tragedy was insincere, stilted, 
and unconvincing. Its comedy was brilliant, 
but it was not merely non-moral and irre- 
sponsible ; it assumed in its reaction against 
Puritanism that virtue is redeemed from 
being contemptible only when circumstances 
render it comic. And the note of the Re- 
storation prevailed through the Revolution ; 
the claims of decency remained in abeyance, 
so far as polite society was concerned, until 
the seventeenth century had passed. Milton, 
as we have said, belongs to the earlier age. 
Besides Bunyan's, the one other great literary 
name of the era is that of John Dryden, 
whose work practically covers the period 
from the Restoration to the end of the 
century. As befits the times in which he 
lived, Dryden's supreme achievement was in the field of satire. His 
political pieces Absalom and Achitophel and the Hind and the Panther are un- 
surpassed in their kind. But satire is essentially intellectual, appealing to 
the intelligent critical judgment, the taste of the audience. If the poet's 
function is to express his own sense of beauty, what the Greeks meant by 
the phrase which we translate as " the beautiful," and to arouse the per- 
ception of it in others, the satirist is not a poet, since he is mainly con- 
cerned with denouncing and exposing the antithesis of the beautiful. Satire 
is the natural product of materialist conditions. 

Such conditions, on the other hand, are rather favourable to scientific 
inquiry, though they are by no means necessary to it. The era of the 
Restoration and the Revolution was one during which England achieved 
far more distinction in natural science and in the literature of Rationalism 
than in the literature of imagination and emotion. But the scientific 
movement had its birth at a much earlier date, in the reign of James I., 




John Dryden. 
[From, the engraving by Houbraken.] 



THE CENTURY 547 

when Harvey was demonstrating the theory of the circulation of the blood 
and Bacon was formulating afresh the whole system of scientific thought. 
Living political problems inspired speculative inquiry into the bases of 
the political structure and the organisation of society. Advocates of 
parliamentary control began to assert that kings were nothing more than 
the chief magistrates of the states over which they ruled. Advocates of 
Absolutism discovered that they ruled by right divine, which it was pro- 
fanity to question. Thomas Hobbes, the disciple and sometime secretary 
of Francis Bacon, recognised in politics a branch of the universal science 
conceived by his master; and being himself a convinced Absolutist, he 
endeavoured to discover a basis for Absolutism more satisfying to the 
reason than the theory of Divine Right. He evolved his own peculiar 
doctrine of the Social Contract, promulgated in the work which he called 
Leviathan. Mankind being by nature in a condition of war, every man 
against every other man, the warring units discovered that each of them 
could profit more, individually, by acting in consort with others for mutual 
assistance. But the individual had no guarantee that his consorts would 
not play him false ; some coercive power was required. Hence men 
entered into a contract with each other to recognise and enforce the 
supreme authority of some one person or body of persons. Here was 
the nucleus of the state, the whole body of persons who entered into 
the contract which was ipso facto binding upon all persons born under 
the contract. But it was not a contract between the ruler and the ruled, 
but between the ruled among themselves ; a contract from which they could 
not free themselves without dissolving society altogether. Society there- 
fore has no rights as against the ruler ; the ruler has obligations, but in 
respect of them he is responsible to himself and the Almighty and to 
no one else. But the doctrine of Thomas Hobbes, published in the 
early years of the Commonwealth, was by no means to the taste of the 
clerical royalism of the day, since it uncompromisingly subjected religion 
to the authority of the absolute ruler of the state. On the other hand, 
the theory of the Social Contract was appropriated and modified by the 
Constitutionalists, and was formulated by John Locke in his Theory of 
Civil Government, the text-book of the Revolution Whigs. The king was 
bound by the contract, being himself a party to it in the primary con- 
stitution of society. If he broke his part of the contract, the other parties 
to it were released from their obligation, not of recognising a supreme 
authority, but of continuing to regard him personally as the seat of that 
authority, of which the ultimate sanction was the will of the society 
as a whole. The names of Hobbes and Locke, widely though they differ, 
stand at the head of the peculiarly English school of moral and political 
philosophy. 

But the highest distinction was reserved for the leaders of English pro- 
gress in natural science, one of whom stands second to none, whether in 
English or in European records. The discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton 



548 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in the field of physics revolutionised men's knowledge of the Universe. 
Not Darwin himself effected so fundamental a change in the imaginative 
conception of an infinite creation, apart from the vast practical bearings of 
the new knowledge. Perhaps the most creditable trait in the character of 
Charles II. was his genuine interest in scientific inquiry. To Charles we 
owe the foundation of the Royal Society; and beside the supreme name of 
Isaac Newton stand those of the astronomer Flamsteed, of Boyle the father 
of modern chemistry, and of Ray the founder of the science of zoology. 




Head-piece from the Book of Common Prayer, 1662. 



BOOK V 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

CHAPTER XXII 

QUEEN ANNE 

I 

MARLBOROUGH 

The death of William III. left Whigs and Tories very evenly balanced in 
the House of Commons, while the Whigs had a small majority in the 
Peers. On the great pressing question of the hour, however, Whigs 
and Tories were for the time being at one. With few exceptions the 
Tories as well as the Whigs were a war party. Under these conditions 
William would have worked with a ministry mainly Whig, since the 
Whigs would have given him the stronger personal support. The Crown 
was still so strong that nothing short of a marked predominance in the 
Opposition would outweigh the king's personal predilections in selecting 
ministers and directing policy. Although William's successor was very far 
from possessing a strong character, this dominance of the Crown lasted 
throughout her reign. The queen chose her own ministers, and she did 
not select them because they represented the dominant party in the 
House of Commons. The queen's choice was generally managed by the 
reigning favourite. The reigning favourite at the moment of her accession 
was Sarah, as yet only Countess of Marlborough ; and for eight years her 
ascendency was the governing factor in English politics. Marlborough him- 
self still counted as a Tory, though his party ties were of the slenderest. 
His closest personal ally was Godolphin, whose son had married one of 
Marlborough's daughters, while another was the wife of the young Earl of 
Sunderland, who this year succeeded to the title. Godolphin's Toryism, 
too, was by no means deeply rooted. 

The natural effect of Anne's accession was in the first place to give the 
Tories the ascendency in her ministry, but in the ministry itself the real 
supremacy lay with Marlborough ; and since Marlborough was the in- 
heritor of William's foreign policy, which was essentially that of the Whigs 

549 



55o THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

and only accidentally that of the Tories, it followed that Marlborough and 
his ally Godolphin presently found themselves relying upon the Whigs and 
parting from the Tories. The curious fact is that Marlborough's own 
supremacy depended on his wife's ascendency over the mind of the queen. 
When Anne freed herself from the yoke of the Duchess Sarah, Marlborough's 
supremacy collapsed. It was not the Revolution but the Hanoverian 
Succession which placed the Crown in subjection to parliament. At 
the moment of Anne's accession, however, everything pointed to the 
ascendency of Tory policy. By associating itself with the war, the party 

had saved its credit with the 
country. The queen's personal 
predilections were Tory, notably 
on questions connected with 
Church and Dissent, and a 
period of Whig depression was 
generally anticipated. 

On the continent William's 
death appeared to be a ground 
for infinite congratulation for 
Louis XIV. For thirty years 
past William's patient, indomit- 
able, remorseless resistance was 
the one obstacle which had 
constantly checked the French 
King's ambitions, and had more 
definitely foiled them since he 
had brought England to join 
forces with Holland. William 
was the diplomatist who had 
combined the powers against 
France, the general who had 
neutralised victory after victory 
of the French arms. William had been the soul and brain of the re- 
sistance to French aggression. And now the great antagonist had 
disappeared, at a moment when Louis occupied a position more advan- 
tageous than ever before. His grandson Philip was de facto king of 
Spain, and was accepted as king by Spain. French troops were in 
occupation of the Spanish Netherlands. Within the German Empire the 
Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, had allied himself with Louis out 
of hostility to the Emperor. His alliance with Savoy gave him the 
entry of Italy. No one as yet knew that the allies had the two greatest 
soldiers of the day to lead them, and that one of them was not only a 
much greater military genius than William had been, but was hardly if 
at all inferior to him as a diplomatist. 

Ostensibly the War of the Spanish Succession was a dynastic struggle 




sraa 
Queen Anne. 

[From the painting by Kneller.] 



QUEEN ANNE 551 

to decide whether the crown of Spain should rest on the head of a 
Hapsburg or of a Bourbon, a question of the balance of power to prevent 
the undue preponderance of France in Europe, a question in which 
England would hardly have been concerned but for the wound inflicted on 
her amour propre by the French king's recognition of a king of England 
whom England herself had rejected — another dynastic question. But in 
actual fact matters of vital interest were at stake. If England had stood 
aside, France and Spain between them would have taken complete pos- 
session of Italy and the Netherlands, and there would have been very 
little left of Holland. France and Spain would have been so closely 
united that they would have counted practically as a single power, and 
might have developed a maritime strength which would have become 
more than a menace to English naval supremacy. The whole of the 
Bourbon dominion would have been closed for British commerce, while 
the British colonies in America and the British trade in the East would 
have been seriously endangered. These possibilities had passed long before 
the war was actually over; but when the war began they were imminent 
perils. Neither statesmen nor merchants probably had any very definite 
idea of a British Empire as the stake for which the nation was fighting ; 
but the mercantile interest, which was chiefly associated with the Whig 
party, was very much aware that unless the nation fought its commerce 
would be in jeopardy. 

Fighting between France and Austria had already begun in Italy ; and 
the allies whom William had brought together were much relieved to find 
that William's death would not withdraw England from the alliance. 
William himself, at the close of his reign, had settled upon Marlborough as 
the man to carry out his policy. Marlborough, conscious where his own 
supreme genius lay, was certain to feel that the road of his ambitions lay 
through European battlefields ; and Marlborough's influence at home was 
ensured by the relations between the Countess Sarah and Queen Anne. 
War was declared in May, and William's nominee occupied his place as 
commander-in-chief' of the allied army. 

The new chief's operations were seriously hampered by the fact that 
instead of his having a free hand his plans were liable to be vetoed by a 
body of Dutch commissioners or " field deputies," who were not by any 
means military experts, while their views of the purposes to be served were 
strictly confined to the immediate securing of Holland against invasion. 
Marlborough, prohibited by them from seeking to destroy the French army 
in the field, had to content himself with manoeuvres which forced the 
enemy back from the line of the Meuse. A series of forts were captured 
and Marlborough's reputation, which had hitherto been called in question, 
was established by the campaign, though his accomplishment fell far short 
of what he would have aimed at achieving if his hands had not been tied. 
In England his success was rewarded by his elevation to a Dukedom. 

Meanwhile, an expedition had been despatched to Cadiz under Sir 



55* 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 



George Rooke, which failed there ignominiously ; but his fleet redeemed his 
credit by breaking the boom of the harbour of Vigo, where it destroyed a 
powerful French squadron, and sank the most part of a great treasure fleet, 
after securing booty to the value of about a million sterling. 

Again, in 1703, the French confined themselves to a campaign in the 
Netherlands, and again the Dutch sought to confine Marlborough to a 
campaign of sieges. His operations were marred by the disobedience to 
orders of the Dutch generals, and the flat refusal of the Dutch field 
deputies to sanction his design of falling upon the main French force. 

The campaign, therefore, was marked 
with no striking results. Meanwhile 
France had designed what should have 
been a paralysing blow to the Grand 
Alliance. Marshal Villars from the Upper 
Rhine, the Elector of Bavaria, and Ven- 
dome from Italy, were to effect a junc- 
tion and strike straight at Vienna. The 
plan was frustrated by the unforeseen. 
Villars and the Elector joined hands ; 
but then the latter proceeded into the 
Tirol, a province of Austria which had 
been promised to him with careless 
generosity by the French king. He 
meant to secure the Tirol and to join 
the French as they came up from Italy 
by the Brenner Pass. But the Tirolese, 
who were not parties to this arrange- 
ment, handled the electoral troops so 
roughly that Max Emanuel evacuated 
the country and declared himself unable 
to proceed to Vienna. Moreover, no French column came from Italy, 
because Victor Amadeus of Savoy played his favourite game of changing 
sides at the critical moment. He fell upon Vendome's communications, 
and the French general had to turn back instead of advancing to join hands 
with Villars. 

Now Austria was in no plight to resist a French invasion in force, 
supported by Bavaria. On the east she was harassed by a Hungarian 
rebellion ; and her military organisation was in a state of desperate disorder, 
which Prince Eugene was patiently struggling to remedy. Austria owed 
the services of that brilliant commander to the fact that when he offered 
his sword to France some years before, when his talents were still unknown, 
she had declined. Though the French scheme of invasion had been baulked 
in 1703, it was to be carried out next year on a less complicated plan of 
campaign. Vienna was doomed, unless England and Holland came to the 
rescue, and neither England nor Holland would dream of withdrawing 




John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. 
[After the painting by Van der Werff.] 



QUEEN ANNE 553 

forces from the Netherlands in order to take care of Austria. It was true 
that if the power of Austria were shattered France would be able to con- 
centrate the whole of her force on the Netherlands ; but English Tories 
had a vague conviction that English troops ought not to be fighting on the 
continent at all, certainly not further off than Holland ; and the Dutch did 
not look further than the defence of their own frontier. 

Marlborough appreciated the situation and formed his own plan, 
which had to be carried out without being suspected either in England or 
in Holland, to say nothing of France. He required a confidant in Holland 
and another in England to hoodwink the two governments while he con- 
certed his scheme with 



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land he obtained an 
authority which sufficed 
for his purpose ; from 
the Dutch he procured 
permission to conduct a 
campaign on the Moselle 
with a large force. To 
the Moselle went Marl- 
borough with his army ; 
the great French force 
still on the Upper Rhine 
awaited developments. 
Suddenly Marlborough 
vanished ; he was racing 
through Germany to 
Bavaria to join Eugene, 
and was fairly out of 

reach before Dutch or English could make any attempt to stop him. 
On the way he joined a German force under Lewis of Baden. 

Bavaria was commanded by a hostile force holding the heights of 
Schellenberg, by Donauwerth ; the position was stormed and carried. 
Meanwhile Tallard, who had taken the place of Villars as commander of 
the army of invasion on the Rhine, had started on his march to join the 
Elector of Bavaria and the French forces under Marsin which were already 
in that region. By August 12th Marlborough had effected his junction 
with Eugene, and the hostile armies lay facing each other, the river or stream 
of the Nebel flowing between them into the Danube. The French right 
was in the village of Blenheim on the bank of the great river. It was the 
task of Eugene on the right of the allies to keep the French left in play 
when the great battle was fought on the 13th. It was not till mid-day 
that the allies opened the attack, which was developed on the two wings. 
At four in the afternoon every attack had been beaten back, but the French 
centre had been weakened to strengthen the wings. It was at this point 



Plan of the Battle of Blenheim. 



554 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

that Marlborough reconstructed his lines for a furious assault upon the 
French centre, which was pierced. The French right was rolled up, and 
nearly the whole of it was cut to pieces, driven into the Danube, or forced 
to surrender ; the left, principally the Bavarian contingent, for the most 
part made its escape, since the victorious army was unable to follow up the 
pursuit. But the victory was absolutely decisive and crushing. The 
French were driven back behind the Rhine, and there was no more thought 
or talk of a French army threatening Vienna. Marlborough returned to 
the Netherlands. 

Meanwhile Admiral Rooke had been despatched with intent to an attack 
upon Toulon, the naval control of the Mediterranean being very definitely a 
part of Marlborough's conception of the war policy as a whole. He did not 
attack Toulon, because the Duke of Savoy was unable to co-operate as had 
been intended. Though he had a great fleet it appeared that he would 
have made no use of it at all if he had not been goaded into trying what 
could be done with Gibraltar. When the attack was made it was found 
that the place was practically incapable of offering resistance. It was 
seized in the name of King Charles III. — that is, the Austrian Archduke 
Charles, the son to whom the Austrian Emperor had finally made over his 
own claim to the Spanish throne — and was garrisoned with English troops. 
Little general importance seems to have been attached to the capture at the 
time except by Marlborough, who declared that no cost should be spared 
to make it secure. Thus accidentally the great fortress passed into English 
control. 

The last parliament of William III. was also the first parliament of 
Queen Anne's reign. It was dissolved in the summer of 1702, and the 
new House of Commons, which met in the autumn, showed a large Tory 
preponderance. The small Whig majority in the Lords was due to the 
presence of the latitudinarian bishops appointed under William — men who 
were in sympathy with the principles of toleration. The queen and the 
Tories were antagonistic to the Nonconformists. The bulk of the Tories 
were opposed to Marlborough, not on the general principle of main- 
taining the war, but because they wished to restrict it to the sea so far as 
England was concerned ; whereas Marlborough, like William, while he 
understood better than the Tories themselves the importance of naval 
supremacy and the way to secure it, was also determined that England 
should take the lead upon land as well. Thus practically from the outset 
there was a growing estrangement between Marlborough and Godolphin on 
the one hand and the Tories on the other, while the duchess exerted herself 
to ally her husband with the Whigs, and to manage the queen on the same 
lines. The advanced Tories for their part endeavoured to establish a 
complete Tory ascendency, increasingly antagonistic to Marlborough him- 
self. The struggle between Tories and Whigs was to a very considerable 
extent a contest between the Commons and the Lords. In this contest 
the Lords were victorious. They were able to defeat the attempt of the 






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QUEEN ANNE S55 

Commons to apply the late Act of Succession so as to exclude from the 
House of Lords the Dutchmen who had received peerages from William. 
They defeated also an Occasional Conformity Bill, which now became a 
favourite scheme of the Tories. William's Toleration Act had conceded 
freedom of worship to the Nonconformists, but retained the tests which 
required all office-holders to participate in Anglican services. Noncon- 
formists in general, while habitually attending their own places of worship, 
did not find it against their consciences to make the necessary attendances 
at the Anglican rites, so that the still valid Corporation and Test Acts did 
not in effect preclude them from taking office. The object of the High 
Churchmen was to disqualify these Occasional Conformists by penalising 
them heavily if they attended the religious services of any body other than 
that of the Church of England while they held office. This attempt also the 
Lords were able to frustrate. Popular sentiment was at first on the High 
Church side, but a strong reaction was produced, in part at least by an 
ironical pamphlet entitled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which pre- 
tended to be an inflammatory appeal to all good Churchmen to insist on the 
extirpation of the enemies of Church and State. The satire on the Tory 
programme was convincing, and the Tories only made matters worse for 
themselves by having the author, Daniel Defoe, set in the pillory. The 
punishment provided the audacious pamphleteer with a popular ovation. 

The Blenheim campaign saved what may be called the Marlborough 
Administration. The Tories had been studiously minimising the Duke's 
doings on the continent ; but the attempt to belittle Blenheim itself recoiled 
on their own heads. The victory was in effect a Whig triumph. A general 
election in the spring of 1705 gave a small Whig majority in the Commons, 
where Harley, the leader of the moderate Tories, alone of that party 
remained firmly attached to the Ministry, since Marlborough and Godolphin 
must now be reckoned as Whigs. But the administration was also rein- 
forced by Henry St. John, the most brilliant of the younger Tories. The 
remaining members of the party were soon displaced by pronounced Whigs. 
The Government thus formed devoted itself to the whole-hearted carrying 
out of Marlborough's war policy ; but it achieved something still more 
vital to the future of the British Empire in carrying through the Incor- 
porating Union between England and Scotland. 



II 

THE UNION 

An Incorporating Union between England and Scotland was a project 
which William III. had been anxious to carry through ; and one of his last 
public acts was to commend such a scheme to the consideration of the 
Scottish parliament. The existing arrangement, which united the crowns 



55 6 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

only, was fraugnt with danger ; for Scotland it was intolerable. As matters 
stood, England was practically able to treat Scotland as a hostile country 
whose commercial interests were to be ruined for the benefit of England ; 
while the Union of the Crowns left the weaker and poorer country no 
means of defending herself except commercial retaliation, which could 
inflict no great harm in England but must inevitably be ruinous to Scotland 
herself. With the Union dissolved, Scotland could at least follow the ancient 
policy of allying herself with the enemies of England abroad ; and separa- 
tion appealed to the Scottish mind as being a restoration of Scotland's 
ancient independence. An independent Scotland could not be ignored by 
England ; a Scotland tied to her as Scotland was now tied could be ignored 
altogether. The fact had become most patent during William's own reign. 
Though he himself had been unable to visit his northern kingdom, he had 
not been unpopular there in spite of Glencoe and the Darien failure. In the 
one case he was held to have been misled by Dalrymple, and in the other 
to have been rather the victim of irresistible pressure than a free agent. 
But it was precisely in that fact that Scottish hostility to the existing arrange- 
ment found its strongest argument. If such a king as William found 
himself compelled to subordinate Scottish to English interests, in spite of 
his zeal for even-handed justice, it was hardly possible that Scotland should 
not suffer yet more under another king who wore the English crown. 
The one condition, therefore, which could make the Union of the Crowns 
tolerable was commercial equality. Scotland was practically agreed that 
the alternative to commercial equality was separation ; and the threat of 
separation was the one means by which commercial equality might be 
obtained. 

There was no possible question of Scotland's right to separate herself 
from England. The two nations were bound together by nothing whatever 
except the accident that a King of Scotland had succeeded to the throne of 
England as the legitimate heir a hundred years before. Since that time each 
nation had asserted its own right to lay down a rule of succession for itself. 
The English Commonwealth indeed, for its own preservation, had asserted 
its right to forbid Scotland by force of arms to set up as a separate kingdom 
under a Stuart monarch ; but there was no possibility of questioning that, 
for so doing she had no other authority than that of superior force. At 
the Restoration England herself had cancelled the absorption of Scotland. 
Both countries had rejected James II., and both had accepted William ; but 
the Acts by which England had fixed the course of the succession to the 
English throne were in no sense binding upon Scotland, which had not 
committed itself any further than the acceptance of Anne. Though 
England had selected the Electress Sophia and her heirs, Scotland was 
perfectly free to settle the Scottish succession on some one else. 

Now England had hitherto turned a deaf ear to all Scottish complaints 
on the score of her commercial policy. The recognised English mer- 
cantile doctrine was that foreign products should not be allowed to compete 



QUEEN ANNE $57 

with home products at all in the home market, or in the foreign market 
so far as such competition could be prevented. With greater insight the 
Commonwealth had realised that English commerce would not suffer by 
freeing the trade with Scotland, Ireland, and the Colonies. But with the 
Restoration England had reverted to the earlier theory. She believed that 
something very tangible would be required to compensate her for any 
concession on the point ; and hitherto Scotland had had nothing very 
tangible to offer. But now came the Scottish threat of separation. The 
Scottish parliament passed what was called the Act of Security, which 
asserted the right of the nation to nominate as successor to the throne of 
Scotland some other person than the Electress Sophia. It claimed also that 
the great officers should be nominated by the Scottish parliament, whose 
consent should be necessary to any declaration of war on the part of a 
king of Scotland who was also king of England. Here then was some- 
thing tangible. Nothing short of an incorporating union could preclude 
the possibility that now or at some future time the exiled Stuarts might be 
restored in Scotland, and England might be hampered as of old by a hostile 
state in the North, ready to attack her whenever she should find herself 
embroiled with continental powers, and ready also to support a Jacobite 
revolt. Immunity from that danger was worth purchasing at the cost of 
commercial concessions. On the other hand, Scotland could hardly be 
secure of the permanence of commercial concessions unless they were 
guaranteed by an incorporating union. The problem was to frame an 
incorporating union sufficiently attractive to Scotland to counterbalance 
the Nationalist bias towards separation. For half Scotland was convinced 
that no union whatever could be devised which would not subordinate 
Scottish to English interests. 

The Convention in Scotland which had called William to the throne, 
and had by him been continued as a parliament, had never been dissolved ; 
Scotland had no Triennial Act. It was exceedingly doubtful whether this 
assembly had any validity as a parliament beyond the term of William's 
own reign. Nevertheless it was this parliament which opened the negotia- 
tions for a union with England at the moment when a House of Commons 
had just been returned with a large Tory majority. The moment therefore 
was unfavourable, because, whereas the Whigs followed William in favouring 
the idea of the union, the Tories as a natural consequence were antagonistic. 
The conference therefore between the Scottish and English commissioners 
which was held in the winter of 1702—3 was unsatisfactory. The authority 
of the Scottish commissioners was dubious, and Scottish Nationalists had 
already repudiated the authority of the parliament. The English com- 
missioners, though ready to make concessions, still fell considerably short 
of the minimum of the Scottish demands. 

The election of a new parliament in Scotland whose legal authority 
should be beyond question left the real Unionists, headed by Queensberry, 
decidedly weak ; while the Nationalists, or " Country Party," seemed likely 



55 8 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

to gain the support of the extreme section who called themselves Cavaliers, 
with most of those who were as yet indisposed to commit themselves to one 
side or the other. The head of this coalition was that Duke of Hamilton 
who figures in Thackeray's Esmond. The real chief of the uncompromising 
Nationalists was Fletcher of Saltoun. It was the parliament thus com- 
posed which passed the Act of Security already referred to, in which the 
crucial clause declared that, after Anne, the same person should be 
incapable of being king or queen of both England and Scotland unless 
England had conceded " a free communication of trade, the freedom of 
navigation, and the liberty of the Plantations," that is to say, of the colonies. 
The Act did not receive the royal assent this year, but did so in the 
following year after it had again been passed with the commercial clause 
omitted. 

The Act of Security received the royal assent almost on the day 
when Marlborough was winning the battle of Blenheim. The event was 
unknown ; disaster was still possible ; if the royal assent had been 
refused, Scotland would have refused the money to pay the army, and if 
Marlborough had been defeated on the Danube, a very critical situation 
would have arisen. After Blenheim, the English Government no longer 
felt that it would be imperilled by anything that Scotland might do. The 
immediate reply of the Whigs to the Act of Security was contained in 
measures stiffening the barriers to Scottish trade, ordering the north of 
England to be put in a state of defence, and treating all Scots as aliens 
unless and until Scotland should adopt the line of succession laid down 
for the English Crown. But these measures were accompanied by further 
proposals for a union ; and again in April 1706 commissioners from the 
two countries were assembled to discuss terms. 

The Scots proposed in effect a commercial union under one crown, 
the two countries retaining their separate legislatures. The English 
insisted that the union of legislatures and the acceptance of the English 
rule of succession were a sine qua non. The Scots required with equal 
emphasis that the freedom of trade should be part of the bargain. These 
conditions having been accepted by both sides, there remained questions 
of detail as to the treatment of finance, the composition of the united 
legislature, and the security in Scotland of the national religion and 
national institutions. In July nearly the whole of the commissioners 
signed the articles ; but the ratification by both parliaments was still 
necessary. The English commissioners had done a good deal towards 
disarming opposition by the liberality of their financial concessions and 
by the reasonableness of their demands as to the relative strength of the 
representation of the two nations in the parliament of Great Britain. 
Before the Scottish Estates met in the autumn to discuss the acceptance 
of the treaty, the English parliament had withdrawn the hostile measures 
with which they had responded to the Act of Security. Marlborough's 
later successes in the Netherlands had confirmed the results of Blenheim, 



QUEEN ANNE 559 

and neither Nationalists nor Jacobites in Scotland could use the fear of 
France as a lever for gaining their own ends. 

Nevertheless, it was still far from certain that the treaty would be 
accepted. On one side there were the zealots of the Covenant, who feared 
for the independence of the Scottish Kirk, on the other the Jacobitism 
which was wide-spread in the Highlands, though comparatively inactive 
in the Lowlands. Everywhere, even among men who were rationally 
convinced of the substantial benefits that would arise from the union, there 
was a sentimental antipathy t® anything which savoured of diminishing 
national independence. It was possible with perfect honesty, and easy 
by means of deliberate exaggeration and misrepresentation, to excite a 
passion of emotional hostility, insomuch that hardly any one believed 
that the union would be carried without bloodshed. But the opposition 
was overcome, not without the employment of influence which a strict 
political morality would have rejected as corrupt. The leaders of the 
opposition were divided. But when the crucial clause deciding the 
question of the legislative union came up for final decision, Hamilton 
abstained from voting, and the clause was carried by a substantial majority. 

The Scottish Act of Union received the royal assent in January 1707 ; 
that of the English parliament received it in March. The Acts came in 
force on the 1st May, and from that time England and Scotland, while their 
separate nationalities remained intact, were merged in the single Power 
of Great Britain. 

From a strictly constitutional point of view, the government of England 
was modified at the Union by nothing more than the addition of forty-five 
Scottish members to the House of Commons and of sixteen Scottish peers 
to the House of Lords. So far as the sovereignty of the country lay with 
the parliament there was no change. It was not so with Scotland, where 
it was only during the reign of William III. that parliament had claimed 
powers approximating to those of the English Estates. The Union in fact 
applied the English system to Scotland. On the other hand, it prepared 
the way for Scotland to exercise a very effective influence in the policy 
and the concerns of Great Britain. Scottish Nationalism was respected, 
the Presbyterian Scottish establishment was secured, the Scottish system 
of law and Scottish institutions generally were preserved. Although the 
Treaty of Union could not in effect debar the sovereign parliament of 
Great Britain from occasionally modifying the original terms, the fact still 
remained that it would be exceedingly dangerous to the public welfare and 
the public peace for the parliament of Great Britain to introduce modifica- 
tions which were not acceptable to the Scottish people. 

When there was no longer any differentiation between English and 
Scottish trade and shipping, the way was cleared for an immense develop- 
ment of Scottish energy and Scottish wealth, although half a century was 
to pass before the effects were thoroughly realised. At the moment and 
for years to come the Union was not popular in Scotland ; it had been 



560 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

carried because the Unionists proved themselves more skilful party managers 
than the Nationalist stalwarts. The opposition to Jacobitism was much 
weakened in the northern country by the expectation that national inde- 
pendence would be restored with the Restoration of the Stuarts. It was 
not till the Jacobites had played their last card and lost the game for good 
and all at Culloden that Scotland became sufficiently reconciled to the 
Union to turn it to full account. 



Ill 

THE WHIG ASCENDENCY 

The year which followed Blenheim was a trying one for Marlborough. 
His design for an effective invasion of France was frustrated by the failure 
of the imperialist troops to co-operate. He succeeded during the summer 
in piercing the French lines with his English and Dutch forces; but when 
he would have followed up the success, he was paralysed by the obstinacy 
of the Dutch field deputies and the misconduct of some of the Dutch 
commanders. There was the usual tendency of the English and Dutch, 
each to suspect the others of playing for their own interests. Through the 
winter Marlborough was engaged in diplomatic efforts to bring the new 
Emperor Joseph and the German States which had joined the alliance 
effectively into line. Yet, although his hand was strengthened in Holland 
by a reaction in his favour, brought about by the discovery of the misconduct 
of some of the Dutch generals, Holland refused in 1706 to sanction his 
design of carrying an allied force into Italy and sweeping the French out 
of that country as he had previously swept them behind the Rhine. The 
Northern German States were equally averse from sharing in such remote 
expeditions. 

Nevertheless he found his opportunity for dealing another destructive 
blow to the French in the Netherlands. The Dutch for once abstained 
from tying his hands, and at the battle of Ramillies in May he inflicted a 
tremendous defeat upon the French marshal Villeroi. The result of the 
victory was a general evacuation by the French of Flanders and Brabant. 
From Ostend to Brussels and Louvain the whole region before the end 
of the year passed into the possession of the allies. Moreover, the battle 
itself produced such an effect on the German princes that they yielded 
to Marlborough's exhortations, and sent their troops to Italy, where the 
campaign, conducted by Prince Eugene, cleared the French out of the 
country. 

During these two years also the allies were possessed with illusory 
ideas on the subject of the Spanish Peninsula itself. The plain fact was 
that the entire peninsula, with the exception of the kingdom of Portugal 
and the province of Catalonia, was on the side of Philip. The Catalonians, 






QUEEN ANNE 561 

who had been robbed of cherished political rights by the supremacy of 
Castile, flung themselves into the cause of the Archduke Charles ; Portugal 
had confirmed the alliance with England which had originated at the time 
of the Restoration in England. Portugal and Catalonia gave the great 
maritime Power an entry to Spain both on the west and on the east. 
Imperial and British troops were'sent to Spain, the latter under the command 
of the brilliant but exceedingly erratic Lord Peterborough. Successes of 
a remarkable character were achieved in a most unorthodox manner ; but 
it was no more possible for the English and Imperialists to carry out 
an effective conquest of Spain 
against the will of the Spanish 
people than for France to 
achieve the same object a 
hundred years later. Although 
in 1706 it seemed for a time 
that the Bourbon cause was 
lost, its ascendency was re- 
covered in the following year 
at the battle of Almanza. The 
French on this occasion were 
commanded by the Duke of 
Berwick, an illegitimate son of 
James II., whose mother was 
Marlborough's sister„ 

Again in that year, 1707, 
Marlborough's great naval de- 
signs were frustrated. None 
of the allies could be easily 
persuaded to take part whole- 
heartedly in any share of a 

general scheme in which their own individual interests did not obviously 
occupy the first place. The clearance of Italy in 1706 opened the way 
for the invasion of France from the south-east. Marlborough designed 
such an invasion, with which the British fleet (as it must be called from 
this date) was to co-operate. The objective was to be Toulon, and the 
capture of Toulon would turn the Mediterranean into a British lake. 
But since this presented itself as a merely British interest to the Austrians, 
no energy was applied to the project. All that Austria and Savoy really 
cared about was to secure the Italian land frontier against French invasion. 

During 1707 Marlborough himself was again engaged in diplomacy, 
not on campaigning. Charles XII. of Sweden had started on his astonishing 
and meteoric career. He had grievances against the Emperor, and there 
was serious danger that his sword would be thrown into the scale, in 
effect against the Grand Alliance. In part at least it was due to 
Marlborough that the danger passed, and Charles plunged into Russia, 

2 N 




The Allied Forces going into action at Ramillies- 
[From a medal struck to commemorate the victory.] 




562 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

a country which was just beginning to assume European importance under 
Peter the Great. 

The situation at the end of 1706 looked so ill for France that Louis 
was prepared to seek peace with the allies on the terms of giving up 
the Bourbon claim to Spain and the Netherlands. The terms, however, were 
rejected by the allies, and the events of 1707 on the whole gave some 
encouragement to France. Hence a vigorous defensive campaign was 
planned in the Netherlands for the next year. Marlborough was hampered 
as usual by the difficulty of obtaining the co-operation of the German 
forces, whose Northern army had now been placed under the command of 

the Elector of Han- 
over, the future 
George I. of Eng- 
land. Eugene,how- 
ever, released from 
Italy, was now 
bringing up a third 
army to the North ; 
and with him Marl 
b or ough could 
always count upon 
cordial agreement. 
But before a junc- 
tion could be effected some of the recently occupied Netherland towns 
revolted against the Dutch ascendency, and the French were threatening 
Oudenarde. Marlborough could not afford to wait for the whole of 
Eugene's army, though he was joined by Eugene in person. By rapid 
and skilful movements he was able to fling himself upon the French 
forces near Oudenarde and to inflict upon them a decisive defeat, 
though too late in the afternoon to effect the complete destruction of 
the French army. The victory enabled Marlborough to prevent the 
French from recovering Ostend, after another brilliant action had been 
fought by General Webb at Wynendael. Before the end of the year the 
important fortress of Lille surrendered. Another valuable capture 
bears further witness to Marlborough's [understanding of the meaning 
of naval supremacy. It was owing to his urgency that a force was 
despatched to Minorca, Port Mahon seized, and the island occupied, a 
winter naval station in the Mediterranean being thereby provided for the 
British fleets. The design was carried out by Lord Stanhope ; the island 
remained a British possession till its loss in 1756. 

Ever since Blenheim the power of the Whigs at home had been 
steadily increasing. The party was controlled by a group known as the 
Junto, consisting of Lord Somers, Charles Montague, who had become 
Lord Halifax, and must not be confused with the " Trimmer " Halifax of the 
Revolution, Sunderland, Wharton, and Lord Orford — that Admiral Russell 



A medal celebrating; the French defeat at Oudenarde. 



QUEEN ANNE . 563 

who had won the battle of La Hogue. It was the completeness of their 
agreement with Marlborough and Godolphin with regard to the war which 
bound these two chiefs to the Whig party, of which they were not pro- 
fessedly members. The Tories, Harley and St. John, endeavoured to 
undermine the Whig influence through Abigail Hill (Mrs. Masham), a 
kinswoman both of Harley and of the Duchess of Marlborough. The 
intrigue was detected at the beginning of 1708, Harley was removed, and 
the ministry became exclusively Whig, though Mrs. Masham still retained 
the ear of the queen in spite of the Duchess. A general election in the 
summer confirmed the Whig ascendency, all the more because the majority 
of the Scots in both Houses for practical pur- 
poses increased the majority of the Whigs. 
Their victory in Parliament was capped by the 
successful campaigns of the year and the apparent 
prostration of France. 

So complete was this prostration that Louis 
was ready to accept almost any terms for peace. 
He was willing to withdraw even from active 
support of his grandson's claim to the Spanish 
throne, and to surrender to the Dutch sundry 
fortresses in the Netherlands which would serve 
as a barrier against French aggression. But 
the Emperor was not satisfied with the terms ; 
and neither the Whigs nor Marlborough wanted 
peace, Marlborough for obvious reasons, and the 
Whigs because they were afraid that peace 
would be followed by a Tory reaction. The 
war party were afraid that Holland might be 
tempted by the offers of Louis to make a separate treaty on her own 
account ; against this they secured themselves by the Barrier Treaty with 
Holland engaging to secure her still more favourable terms. The demands 
finally formulated for the acceptance of the French king were in plain 
terms intolerable ; for he was required not only to withdraw his support 
from Philip but to employ French troops in ejecting him from Spain, on 
which Louis very pertinently observed that if he must fight some one 
he would fight not his friends but his enemies. 

A wave of fiery enthusiasm ensued. A new army was drawn together, 
ill-fed and ill-clad but burning with patriotic ardour. Under the com- 
mand of Villars, the best of the French marshals, it met Marlborough 
and Eugene at Malplaquet. The formal victory fell to the allies, but 
at the cost of terrific carnage, and losses heavier than those of the 
French, who were able to beat an orderly and secure retreat. It was 
a Pyrrhic victory ; though it enabled the victors to capture some more 
fortresses in the course of the next twelve months, they had been 
punished too severely to strike any decisive blow. And when the 




Queen Anne clipping the wings of 
the Gallic cock. 

CA contemporary caricature of the French 
position in 1708.] 



564 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

twelve months were past, the war party was no longer in the ascendant 
in England. 

Again, in Spain renewed campaigning went on the whole favourably 
10 the allies through the first half of 17 10, but the Spaniards remained 
obstinately loyal to Philip. In the autumn they received more reinforce- 
ments from France, and at the end of the year the small British contingent 
under Stanhope forming the rearguard of the allied army was surprised 
and compelled to surrender at Brihuega. The other successes of the allies 
had little effect beyond hardening their hearts to the persistent rejection of 
peace proposals. 

In the meanwhile matters had been going ill with the ministry in 




The campaigns of Marlborough. 

England. In 1709 the Duchess of Marlborough's influence with the queen 
was waning, and all Anne's personal sympathies were with the Tories. 
Moreover, there was serious friction between the Junto on one hand and 
Godolphin and Marlborough on the other. In the winter both Marlborough 
and the Junto committed serious blunders. Marlborough, anxious to secure 
his own position above party, applied to the queen to be made Captain- 
General for life. The fact sufficed by itself to destroy his popularity and 
to arouse ominous suspicions that he was scheming for a military dictator- 
ship. The Whigs found their own pitfall in an outbreak of High Church 
fanaticism. An egregious divine, Dr. Henry Sacheverell, had long made 
himself notorious by his attacks upon dissenters and upon the latitudi- 
narian bishops. On November 5th he preached in St. Paul's an egregious 
sermon denouncing toleration and comprehension, directed against pro- 
minent politicians and more particularly against Godolphin, to whom he 



QUEEN ANNE 



5&S 



referred by the popular nickname of Volpone, taken from Ben Jonson's 
play. 

The thing itself was of no serious consequence, but it was typical of 
the attitude of the High Clerical Tories who represented Whig ascendency 
as a danger to the Church. The Whig leaders, urged on by the vindictive- 
ness of Godolphin, resolved to silence the political extravagances of the 
pulpit instead of leaving them alone. Sacheverell was impeached, and was 
forthwith prematurely glorified as a martyr ; his trial caused as much 
excitement as that of the seven bishops. The real object of the Whigs in 
the prosecution, apart from Godolphin's personal feeling of vindictiveness, 
was to procure the condemnation of the prevalent Tory doctrines as sub- 
versive of the principles of the Revolution and as being in fact veiled 
Jacobitism. There was not much difficulty, however, in representing their 
action as mere persecution of a political opponent. The Doctor was a 




A High Church caricature on the Sacheverell prosecution, 1710. 

fashionable preacher, and the fashionable audience who attended his trial 
were moved to sympathetic tears by his eloquent defence. The Peers, by a 
small majority, found him guilty of the charges, but they had taken alarm 
at the popular excitement ; the queen was known to be favourable to the 
culprit ; and the sentence merely suspended him from preaching for three 
years, and ordered the obnoxious sermon to be publicly burnt. The Whigs 
had only succeeded in, making themselves look foolish. 

Through the early months of 17 10 Harley was secretly intriguing to 
sow dissensions among the Whig chiefs and to foster the queen's in- 
creasing determination to escape from the yoke of Duchess Sarah. He 
brought into play the erratic Shrewsbury, who had secluded himself from 
politics for many years past. Before midsummer the queen had broken 
finally with her ancient but too domineering confidante. The disappear- 
ance of the Duchess of Marlborough from her intimate society was followed 
by the dismissal first of Sunderland and then of Godolphin. Harley 
reappeared in the ministry. His own object was in all probability to form 



566 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

a ministry made up of the moderates of both parties. But there was 
no real coalescence. By September all Harley's colleagues were Tories, 
while the House of Commons was the same which had been returned as 
triumphantly Whig some two years before. A general election was in- 
evitable, and resulted in the return of a strong Tory majority. 



IV 

THE TORY ASCENDENCY 

The Barrier Treaty had done the war party no good, since it had 
encouraged the popular cry that England was pouring out blood and 
treasure merely to benefit the Dutch ; moreover, the extravagant conditions 
of peace offered to and rejected by Louis could not be reconciled with 
that desire to bring the war 4o an honourable close by which every one was 
professedly actuated. The events of 17 10 demonstrated with some clearness 
that the war was not likely to come to an end at all if Britain insisted 
on the Whig formula which absolutely refused to recognise the Bourbon 
king of Spain. The Tory ministers were entirely warranted in conveying 
to France their readiness to enter upon negotiations with a view to 
terminating the war. The peace party received a great accession of 
strength by the death of the Emperor Joseph and the consequent succession 
of his brother the Archduke Charles to the Austrian dominion and the 
Imperial Crown. England had not gone into the war in order to revive 
for Charles VI. the enormous empire of Charles V. A Hapsburg on the 
Spanish throne had certainly appeared preferable to a Bourbon so long as 
it was clearly understood that the different Hapsburg crowns were not to 
be worn by one person ; but if the Austrian Emperor, Charles VI., was 
established also as the head of the Spanish Empire as the result of a great 
European war ostensibly directed to maintaining the balance of power, the 
paradox would be somewhat glaring. 

Throughout 1 7 1 1 secret negotiations with France were in progress. 
There was, in fact, only one way to bring the war to an end — that one of 
the great Powers should come to terms with France and then insist upon 
the other Powers accepting those terms. Only by pressure of this kind 
could they be induced individually to surrender extravagant claims. The 
war itself was languishing ; Marlborough was conscious of the precarious 
character of his own position in England, since his wife had not only 
ceased to be the queen's intimate confidante, but had been definitely 
dismissed. The political managers in England were Harley, the nominal 
chief of the Tories, and the brilliant St. John, men whose characters and 
aims were too incompatible for the alliance to last, though they might be 
considered as each other's complements until they became antagonists. 
Harley was an opportunist with a dislike for extremes and a preference for 



QUEEN ANNE 567 

back-stairs methods. St. John was an ambitious adventurer, entirely 
unscrupulous, and of boundless audacity, who held Harley's cautious and 
non-committal attitude in contempt, though he was quite ready to assume 
the same attitude merely as a mask. For him the matter of first-rate 
importance was to gain a complete ascendency over the fox-hunting Tory 
squires whom he despised from the bottom of his soul. 

But for both Harley and St. John the first thing was to procure peace 
and to get rid of Marlborough. The two objects were secured by a coup d'etat 
at the end of the year. The way was blocked by the hostile majority in the 
House of Peers, small but sufficient. The majority was converted into a 
minority by the innovation of adding twelve Tories to the Peerage, and the 
transformation of the House of Lords was accompanied by the dismissal of 
Marlborough and the appointment of Ormonde to the chief military command. 
The ministers could conduct with a free hand the negotiations which now 
opened at Utrecht for a general peace, as to the terms of which they had 
already come to their agreement with France. 

The Peace of Utrecht, which was signed in the spring of 1713, was the 
great achievement of the Tory ministry. In its broad lines it was such a 
treaty as would have been approved by William III., although the terms 
obtained by France were infinitely better that those which Louis would 
have accepted in 1707, 1709, or 17 10. It was of little importance that 
the Emperor chose to prolong the war with France on his own account 
for some little while before he would surrender his claims. Philip was to 
retain Spain and the Indies, but he and his house were to be barred from 
the French succession ; the Spanish Netherlands became the Austrian 
Netherlands, while Holland held the barrier fortresses. Naples and 
Milan went to Austria ; Sicily was handed over as a kingdom to the Duke 
of Savoy. The gains of Great Britain from the treaty were substantial. 
She retained Minorca and Gibraltar, bases for the naval command of the 
Mediterranean. In America she receiyed Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and 
the Hudson Bay Territory, all of them hitherto subjects of periodical 
dispute with France. In the West Indies she acquired the island of 
St. Christopher. To her was transferred what was called the Asiento, 
restricted rights of trading with the Spanish colonies which had recently 
been enjoyed by France. This included a monopoly of the supply of negro 
slaves and the right of sending one trading vessel annually to trade in the 
South Seas. Further, France undertook to dismantle Dunkirk, formally 
repudiated the claim of the exiled Stuarts to the Crown of Great Britain, 
and acknowledged the Hanoverian Succession. 

The war, which was originally commenced for sound enough reasons, had 
been carried on successfully by the Whigs, and the Tories brought it to an 
end by a peace which came as near to achieving the original aims of the war 
as could have been hoped for. Great Britain herself had very substantial 
gains in the American territories and the two new naval bases in the Mediter- 
ranean. But while the peace itself might be claimed as satisfactory, two at 



568 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

least of the attendant circumstances were extremely discreditable to the 
ministry. Great Britain induced the allies to come to terms by practically 
deserting them in the field. Ormonde's forces were neutralised by orders 
from home, while he was still supposed to be acting in concert with the 
allies. This might perhaps have been excused as being no very great 
breach of international political morality ; but no excuse whatever could 
be found for the desertion of the Catalonians. The British had directly 
encouraged Catalonia to rise in arms against the Bourbon monarchy ; they 
were bound in honour to protect the Catalonians against any vindictive 
treatment. They did nothing of the kind ; they made no terms for their 
Spanish allies, and the rebellious province was left to the tender mercies 
of the Spanish monarchy. 

Probably the Tories did themselves more harm by proposing a com- 
mercial treaty with France to accompany the Treaty of Utrecht. In 1704 
the Methuen Treaty with Portugal had secured a market for English wool by 
granting a preference to Portuguese wines, which gave port wine its enormous 
vogue throughout the eighteenth century. The Methuen Treaty was uni- 
versally applauded, because the value of the exports to Portugal was much 
greater than that of the imports ; what was called the u balance of trade " 
was heavily in favour of England, because the difference in values was made 
up in bullion. A commercial treaty with France, on the other hand, would 
on the same principles have been in favour of France, where there was no 
great market for English goods, whereas a lowered tariff would have induced 
a great demand for French wines and other goods in Britain. Bullion 
would have gone out of Great Britain into France ; so that, according to 
the theory of the time, a country generally hostile to us would have gained 
at our expense. The proposal was received with so much indignation that 
it had to be dropped. 

This affair is to be noted as a striking example of the fact that the 
Whigs were much more determined advocates of the mercantile theory of 
economics than the Tories. The strength of Toryism lay with the landed 
interest, and the landed interest had not become protectionist for the simple 
reason that the country had no difficulty in producing all the corn it wanted 
for itself. The strength of the Whigs lay among the mercantile classes, 
and the mercantile classes still believed that their own interests were safe- 
guarded by protection. In the nineteenth century the points of view were 
reversed ; it was the landowners who demanded Protection and the mer- 
cantile classes who carried Free Trade. 

The Whigs had believed that they could best maintain themselves in 
power by prolonging the war ; the Tories had displaced them by advo- 
cating peace on the ground that the war was being continued for the 
benefit not of Great Britain but of the allies. Hitherto both parties had 
posed alike as supporters of the Hanoverian Succession. But while 
the Tory leaders were endeavouring to maintain themselves in power by 
securing the favour of Queen Anne, the Whig leaders were busy in im- 




QUEEN ANNE 569 

pressing upon the court of Hanover the conviction that they were the 
friends of Hanover, and that the Hanoverian Succession was endangered 
by the Tory ascendency. The Tories did not grasp the position until it was 
too late. Before the end of 17 13 it was already a moral certainty that, 
as soon as the Elector of Hanover ascended the British throne, he would 
place himself in the hands of the Whigs. And the Tories had only just 
awakened to the fact that the succession question was imminent. Harley, 
now known as the Earl of Oxford, was not the man to guide the party in 
an emergency, but he was the man in possession. St. John, who was now 
Viscount Bolingbroke, found that the time had arrived when he must grasp 
the leadership. When that was secured, he would have to stake everything 
on a Stuart Restoration, 
though until he held com- 
plete control such a policy 
could not be avowed. The 
general election which fol- 
lowed the peace had pre- 
served the predominance of 
his party in Parliament. The A hackne y coach about I7Ia 

. . ' [From a broadside. ] 

matter of vital importance 

for him was to get rid of Oxford, and himself to obtain such a dominant 

influence' with the party as would enable him to carry it with him when 

the moment arrived for throwing off the mask and declaring for King 

James. 

If the game was to be won it would not be by any futile effort to con- 
ciliate adverse interests and win over the moderates. The thing could 
only be effected by an appeal made to popular passion at the right moment, 
and the Sacheverell incident pointed to a wave of High Church fanaticism 
as the most promising means to attaining the end in view. To secure the 
High Churchmen the Schism Act was introduced and carried, which 
entirely barred dissenters from educational work. It was an obvious first 
step towards the revival of the Clarendon Code, overthrown by William's 
Toleration Act, but still dear to the hearts of the High Church Tories. It 
served its purpose in rallying the whole of that section to the enthusiastic 
acceptance of Bolingbroke's leadership. Meanwhile he had not only been 
intriguing with James, but had been steadily employing Mrs. Masham to 
destroy Oxford's influence with the queen. 

On July 27th the intrigues were so far successful that Anne dismissed 
Oxford, and Bolingbroke had a clear field in forming a new administration. 
Ready and swift as he was, death was swifter. In three days all the con- 
trolling executive offices had been conferred upon Jacobites, secret or 
avowed ; yet a few days more were needed to make the control effective and 
enable Bolingbroke openly to throw off the mask. The few days were not 
given. On the third day after the fall of Oxford the queen had an apoplectic 
stroke. The Council met, among them the incalculable Shrewsbury. To 



570 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

them entered two of the great Whig Peers, Somerset and Argyle, to offer 
their aid in this melancholy emergency. Custom restricted attendance 
at the Council meetings to the acting ministers of state, but theoretically 
all members of the Privy Council could claim the right to be present. 
The arrival of Argyle and Somerset was sufficient proof that the Whigs had 
concerted their measures for the emergency. Bolingbroke dared not take 
the tremendous risk of there and then throwing off the mask and declaring 
against the Hanoverian Succession. Some one, perhaps he himself, pro- 
posed that Shrewsbury, who was obviously in collusion with the Whigs, 
should be made Lord Treasurer ; Bolingbroke at any rate did not venture 
to resist the proposal. When the physicians reported that the queen had 
recovered consciousness a deputation was sent to the dying woman's 
chamber to request her to confer the Treasurer's staff upon Shrewsbury. 
She acquiesced, handing it to him with the pathetic words, " Use it for the 
good of my people." A general meeting was immediately called of all the 
available members of the Privy Council — a very different thing from the 
selected gathering of Bolingbroke's instruments which had been interrupted 
by the Whig Peers. The Council acted as a united Government, whose 
first business was to secure the Hanoverian Succession, and to take 
measures against any possibility of insurrection or invasion. On the fifth 
day after Oxford's fall Queen Anne died, and George I. was proclaimed 
king of England, while no man ventured to raise a dissentient voice. 






CHAPTER XXIII 
THE WHIGS, AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 

I 

THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION 

The Hanoverian Succession confirmed and extended the principles of the 
Revolution ; it was absolutely irreconcilable not merely with the doctrine 
of divine right but with any very elevated conception of monarchy. The 
Revolution itself had been brought 
about by the determination to put an 
end to government by a king who 
had made himself intolerable, and to 
provide security against a like mis- 
government on the part of his succes- 
sors. A legal justification was required 
to satisfy the English conscience ; it 
was found in the doctrine of the Social 
Contract as expounded by Locke, in 
the elective character of the early 
English monarchy, and in the parlia- 
mentary title of Henry IV. and Henry 
VII. But the Revolution had been 
carried out successfully because Mary 
and Anne were conspicuously English 
princesses, and Mary's husband, though 
a Dutchman and a Calvinist, was still 
grandson of King Charles the Martyr, 
and a man indubitably fit to play 
the part of a king. He was, in fact, 

the man of whom England stood in need at the moment. But now 
every living descendant of King Charles was a Romanist, barred from the 
succession by religion. What Great Britain wanted was not a king but 
some one to sit on the throne and prevent it from being occupied by a 
Roman Catholic. The nearest representative of the blood royal who 
would answer the purpose happened to be a rather elderly German prince 
whose grandmother had been a daughter of James I. 

Now William had been made king upon conditions, but the conditions 

S7i 




George I. 

[From the painting by Kneller in the National Portrait 
Gallery.] 



572 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

did not make him into a dummy, He was a king in fact as well as in 
name, because England needed him quite as much as he needed England. 
Now, however, England needed not George in particular, but merely some 
colourable imitation of a king to occupy the place of James Stuart. George 
and his son would have gained nothing by threatening to go back to 
Hanover. They were kings on condition of good behaviour. Neither 
their talents nor their characters procured them the respect or affection of 
their British subjects ; if the country was loyal to anything it was not 
to the person of its kings but to the principles of the Revolution. The 
Hanoverians had no choice but to place themselves practically without re- 
serve in the hands of the dominant party in Great Britain. Bolingbroke 
had destroyed the Tory party by identifying it with Jacobitism, and con- 
sequently the Whigs held complete control of the situation and retained 
it for more than fifty years. The comparatively small influence which 
under such conditions the Crown was able to exercise finally estab- 
lished the supremacy of parliament and the system of party government 
which was only coming into being during the reigns of William and 
Mary. 

The Whigs had very carefully taught the Elector, and his mother 
before him, that they could win and hold the Crown of England only by 
grace of the Whigs and by recognising their dependence on the Whigs. 
In accordance with the arrangements made for dealing with the situation 
when Queen Anne should die, the government was vested in the hands of 
a group of " Lords Justices" nominated by the new king, until he himself 
should arrive in the country. This was in accordance with the precedents 
of William's reign, when the king himself had been absent in the Nether- 
lands. The Lords Justices nominated were all Whigs ; when George 
himself came to England in September he appointed all his ministers from 
that party. They soon showed themselves bent on the entire destruction 
of the Tories. The dissolution of parliament and a general election 
returned a strong Whig majority. A commission was appointed to inquire 
into the proceedings in connection with the Treaty of Utrecht, and on the 
strength of its report Bolingbroke, Oxford, and Ormonde were all im- 
peached. Bolingbroke had already taken refuge in flight and had joined 
James Stuart. Ormonde, frightened by the impeachment, promptly 
followed him. Oxford declined to run away, and was justified by the 
event. It was too obviously impossible to condemn as treasonable 
proceedings which had been ratified by the votes of two parliaments as 
well as by the approval of the monarch who was reigning at the time. 

France was pledged by the Treaty of Utrecht to recognise the Hano- 
verian Succession; but at the deathbed of James II. Louis ignored a 
similar pledge which he had given at the Peace of Ryswick. France might 
again repudiate her pledges, and if she supported the claim of James Stuart 
it was conceivable that a well-organised Jacobite rising might be successful. 
Common-sense and material interests were on the side of the Hanoverian 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 573 

Succession ; sentiment was entirely on the other side. But the whole 
machinery of government was in the hands of men to whom a Stuart 
restoration would mean political ruin. There were three things absolutely 
necessary to a successful insurrection — organisation, enthusiasm, and the 
certainty of extraneous, that is to say French, support. The Jacobites 
attempted to upset the new dynasty without any one of the three requisites. 
Unfortunately for them Bolingbroke was the only intelligent person who 
attempted to direct their counsels, and the unintelligent people carried out 
their own plans behind his back. Bolingbroke had bent himself to winning 
over King Louis, but, as in 1 7 1 4, fate fought against him. Louis was dying ; 
on September 1st, 17 15, he died. His sickly great-grandchild Louis XV. 
became king of France, and the interests of the Orleans regency were entirely 
opposed to a Stuart restoration. 

Nevertheless a few days later the Earl of Mar raised King James's 
standard in the north of Scotland, where he had collected together a group 
of Highland chiefs on the pretext of a great hunting. The Government 
were somewhat unaccountably unprepared. Jacobite sentiment and hatred 
of the Union were real forces in Scotland capable of effective combination. 
Prompt and vigorous action on Mar's part might have given him at the 
outset such an advantage as would have made the insurrection exceedingly 
formidable. But a Bobbing John," as he was nicknamed, was incapable of 
promptitude or vigour. While he sat still and did nothing the Duke of 
Argyle, a soldier and statesman of considerable distinction, was despatched 
to Scotland to suppress the insurrection. On November 13th the armies 
of Argyle and Mar met and fought at Sheriffmuir. The battle was 
characteristic in its futility — 

" There's some say that we wan, 

And some say that they wan, 
And some say that none wan at a', man ! 

But ae thing I'm sure, 

That at Sheriffmuir 
A battle there was that I saw, man : 

And we ran and they ran, 

And they ran and we ran, 
And we ran and they ran awa', man." 

Both the left wings broke and ran ; some ran without any reason, and 
on the whole the Jacobites ran most effectively. To have called the fight a 
victory for either party would have been absurd ; some five or six hundred 
appear to have fallen on either side ; but the practical result was that when 
the running was over Mar retreated and Argyle did not. The advance of 
the insurgents was stopped, and all the heart that there ever had been in 
the rebellion was taken out of it. 

When Mar raised the standard of James in the North the English 
Jacobites ought to have risen simultaneously. But insurrection in the 
Scottish Highlands was a much simpler matter than in England, where 



574 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

there were no solid Jacobite districts, and the government troops could be 
moved with comparative ease and rapidity. The news of the Scottish rising 
was immediately followed by the arrest of half-a-dozen leading English 
Jacobites ; and if any hopes of French help had survived the death of Louis 
XIV. they were quenched by prompt demonstration that the fleet was ready 
for action. In the north of England, however, a number of Jacobite 
squires collected together under the leadership of the Earl of Derwent- 
water and Sir Thomas Forster, who was nominated General. Over the 
border Lord Kenmure, with Lords Nithsdale, Carnwath, and Wintoun, 
declared for King James, and were joined by Brigadier M'Intosh with a 
few Highlanders from Mar's force. These two companies united at Kelso. 
But the Englishmen would not march North to help Mar against Argyle, 
and the Highlanders would not march South to strike at the small govern- 
ment force commanded by General Carpenter. While they tried to make 
up their minds to do something government troops were mustering. At 
last the insurgents determined to invade Lancashire, whereupon the High- 
landers returned home. The rest, some fifteen hundred strong, marched 
through Cumberland southwards, collecting miscellaneous recruits by the 
way till they got to Preston. Here they were attacked by Carpenter and 
Wills. Led with any intelligence they should have been able to rout the 
government troops ; but after having repulsed on attack their commanders 
were inveigled or bluffed into surrendering. Sheriffmuir was being fought 
on the same day. 

Thus ignominiously collapsed the rising in England. In Scotland it 
dragged on a little longer. James himself arrived on the scene with the 
idea that his presence would give heart to his followers. But the un- 
fortunate prince suffered from an inveterate melancholy which would have 
damped the most eager enthusiasm. Argyle was in no hurry to strike 
home ; but the Jacobites had lost the power of striking at all. Their forces 
diminished day by day, James in despair withdrew from the country, and 
the once threatening Jacobite conflagration guttered dolefully out. 

Most of the leaders escaped to France ; some were attainted. Of the 
prisoners taken at Preston some who had been army officers were shot. 
The peers were condemned to be beheaded, and several of the leading 
commoners to be hanged. But some succeeded in breaking prison, others 
were respited, and only Kenmure, Derwentwater, and twenty-six commoners 
were actually put to death. The plain truth was that it was unsafe to 
proceed to extremities, because too many people would have been incon- 
veniently compromised. Everybody on both sides had friends in the 
opposite camp, and no one felt quite sure that though it was Hanover's 
turn to-day it might not be the Stuart's turn to-morrow, and it would be 
highly impolitic to make the Jacobites vindictive. In not a few families 
one or two sons had been allowed to join the rising to demonstrate the 
family's loyalty to the Stuarts, while the head of the house had remained 
at home to demonstrate its loyalty to the Hanoverian Succession. And 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 57 $ 

the nation at large sat still, in scarcely disturbed apathy, while the supreme 
question of the day was settled by two or three thousand regular troops, 
a rabble of fox-hunters, a few broken adventurers, and some Highland 
clansmen, most of whom cared more about clan feuds than the real issues 
that were at stake. A few forfeitures, the construction of some military roads 
in the Highlands, and an ineffective measure of disarmament, were the 
principal outcome of the Fifteen. 

It produced however one measure of constitutional importance. Under 
the Triennial Act a general election was due in 1717, and as matters stood 
it was clearly possible that there might then be a Jacobite majority in 
parliament. So the Whig House of Commons resolved to prolong its own 
life, and passed the Septennial Act, which extended the period of parliament 
from three years to seven — an Act which remained in force until the passing 
of the Parliament Act in 191 1. The Whigs were impervious to the Tory 
outcry that such a proceeding was unconstitutional. For precedent there 
was the case of the Long Parliament, which had made its own life legally 
interminable, except with its own consent. For the rest, the measure was 
necessary to secure the stability of government. 



II 
THE FRENCH ALLIANCE 

The death of Louis XIV. in September 17 15 produced what was 
practically a revolution in international relations. Only one sickly child, 
Louis XV., stood between Philip V. of Spain and the Crown of France. 
Philip had abjured all pretensions to that Crown, and if that abjuration 
held good, the heir of the young Louis was Philip, Duke of Orleans, the 
son of the second son of Louis XIII. Orleans was declared regent; but 
there was no escaping the possibility that if Louis died Philip might act 
upon the legal doctrine that no abjuration of the French Crown could be 
valid. Hence the regent Orleans, so long as he should be heir-presumptive 
to the French throne, had the very strongest interest in upholding the 
terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. The House of Orleans and the House of 
Hanover were thus mutually bound to support each other ; and there 
followed a period of close alliance between the French and British Govern- 
ments. Further, this possible succession question created an antagonism 
between the Spanish Bourbon and the Government of France ; for the 
time being there was no danger to Europe from that menace of Bourbon 
aggression, which had been conjured up by the old king's acceptance of 
the Spanish Crown for his grandson. 

These conditions had a double effect on naval policy. On the one 
hand, France was satisfied to rely upon the alliance with Great Britain for 
security against maritime attack, Holland during the late war had already 



576 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

dropped behind, and the British naval supremacy thus secured was in- 
creased by the new combination. On the other hand, the Spanish minister 
Alberoni was inspired with a passion for reviving the Spanish capacity for 
maritime rivalry ; since, while the British dominated the seas, Spain was 
cut off from adventures for recovering power in the Italian Peninsula, now 
mainly absorbed by Austria. 

Though the Whigs were in power, the great Whig names of Anne's 
reign very soon disappeared. Marlborough, at first recalled to a position 
of confidence, broke down completely at a very early stage ; Somers was 
worn out ; Shrewsbury vanished after his appearance as the Whig deus ex 
machind. Stanhope and Townshend became the leading counsellors of the 

Crown ; and with Townshend was pre- 

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION gently associated Sir Robert Walpole, 

Louis xiii. whose abilities had already won for 

■ ! : him a marked ascendency in the House 

Louis xiv. Philip of Orleans, of Commons. Of the Junto, Sunder- 

Dau'phin. Regent Philip land alone held a leading position. 

I of Orleans. At the beginning of 17 17 there was a 

Burgundy. Philip v. split between the Whigs, which caused 

Louis 1 xv. ofSpain - Townshend and Walpole to retire and 

form a Whig Opposition, which vigor- 
ously criticised, and sometimes successfully challenged, the measures of 
the Government conducted by Stanhope and Sunderland. The Whig split 
was almost simultaneous with the development of the understanding 
between the French and British Governments into the Triple Alliance, 
in which Holland was included. 

Alberoni had at first probably hoped to procure the advancement of 
Spain by closer relations with England, to be purchased by commercial 
concessions. Such hopes could not survive the Franco-British Alliance, 
and he was using his immense capacities for intrigue to work up combina- 
tions of the Baltic Powers, which, by threatening Hanover itself and the 
Hanoverian Succession in England, should prevent the Maritime Power 
from active intervention in his other designs. Then in 171 7 he opened a 
premature attack upon Sardinia, which had fallen to Austria in the settle- 
ment after Utrecht. The discovery and exposure of the intrigues with the 
Northern Powers spoilt whatever existed in the nature of a plot ; France 
and Great Britain intervened in favour of Austria, and forced the accept- 
ance of an agreement which satisfied neither Austria nor Spain, but which 
gave Sicily to Austria, and Sardinia in place of it to Savoy. Thus the 
rulers of Savoy became the kings of Sardinia, the progenitors of the 
present royal house of Italy. 

The check only incited Alberoni to fresh energy. He renewed his 
secret intrigues, which were intended to bring about an anti-Hanoverian 
combination between Charles XII. of Sweden and his sometime great 
enemy the Tsar Peter, the creator of the power of Russia. He strove 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 577 

harder than ever to build up a mighty Spanish fleet. In France he 
intrigued with the faction which opposed the Orleans regime. In the 
summer of 17 18 he struck again, launched an expedition against Sicily, 
and laid siege to Messina. But the British, fully alive to the great 
preparations which had been in progress, were ready with a strong fleet 
under command of Admiral Byng in the Mediterranean. Although Spain 
and Great Britain were not at war, the British fleet went in search of the 
Spanish fleet. They met off Cape Passaro. The result was entirely 
decisive. Only ten of the Spaniards escaped annihilation, while only one 
British ship was seriously damaged. The work was completed by Captain 
Walton. There is an established fiction, commonly endorsed by historians, 
that Walton's despatch describing his operations was the briefest on record 
and ran, " Sir, we have taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships which 
were on this coast, the number as in the margin." Unfortunately the real 
despatch is extant, and is ten times as long as the laconic epistle with 
which the captain has been credited. But though Walton gained an 
undeserved renown, the fact remained that the battle of Passaro destroyed 
all prospect of the resuscitation of a Spanish fleet on a scale which could 
threaten the British supremacy. Nevertheless it was not followed by a 
declaration of war. Byng's purpose was sufficiently accomplished. Spain 
could not fight Austria in Sicily and Italy unless she held command of 
the seas. 

Every one of Alberoni's schemes miscarried. The anti-Orleanist plot 
in France was detected and crushed. Charles XII. of Sweden was killed 
by a stray shot before Fredricshalle in Norway, and a revolution brought 
into power in Sweden a government from which Hanover had nothing to 
fear. A British squadron on the Baltic was an argument which Peter the 
Great found conclusive. Austria was added to the Triple Alliance, and at 
the beginning of 17 19 the United Powers declared war against Spain. 
Alberoni made a last desperate attempt to despatch an armada, which went 
to pieces in the Bay of Biscay before a blow had been struck. A French 
army entered Spain, and a British squadron wrought havoc at Vigo. 
Philip realised that the struggle was hopeless, Alberoni was dismissed and 
banished, and the Spaniards evacuated Sicily. The arrangements pro- 
posed in 1 717 were generally confirmed. The real root cause of the 
recent trouble had been the ambitions of Philip's queen, Elizabeth Farnese. 
The heir to the Spanish throne was Ferdinand, Philip's son by a previous 
wife, and Elizabeth wanted a separate dominion in Italy for her own 
offspring. She had now to be content with the recognition of her son 
Charles as heir to the duchies of Tuscany, Parma, and Piacenza, which 
were to be definitely separated from the Spanish Crown. 

In England the Stanhope administration carried out the traditional 
Whig policy by repealing the Schism Act and the Occasional Conformity 
Act which the Tories had at length passed during their period of power in 
the last years of Queen Anne's reign. Walpole, in Opposition, did not 

2 O 



578 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

scruple to criticise the repeal, although no man had more energetically 
denounced those measures when they were introduced. In other respects, 
however, the divisions of the party were destined to have beneficial results, 
and in fact to confirm the Whig domination instead of wrecking it, as at 
one time they seemed in danger of doing. 

The revolution Whigs were not in the slightest degree democrats. 
They represented in the main two principles, parliamentary supremacy 
and religious toleration ; but the supremacy of parliament did not for 
them mean popular government. The steady strength of the Whig party 
lay in the House of Lords ; all the more since the addition to their 
numbers of the Scottish peers and of former Tories who had repudiated 
all connection with their party to escape the Jacobite taint. A bill was 
brought in by Sunderland which would have transformed the House of 
Peers into a permanent oligarchy. The whole number of peers was to 
be limited to six more than there were at that time. Peerages which 
lapsed on the failure of male heirs might be replaced. The Crown was to 
nominate twenty-five Scottish peers, instead of the sixteen whom the body 
of Scottish peers now elected from their own number. This increase 
was by way of compensation for the arrangement under the Act of Union 
by which Scottish peers might be made peers of Great Britain, when they 
would not longer be included among the sixteen, but would sit in the 
House each in his own right. The avowed object of the bill was to 
prevent a repetition of the party move by which the Tories had procured 
the creation of twelve peers in order to obtain a majority for the passing 
of a particular measure. But the power to create peers was the only 
means of preventing a standing majority in the Upper House from exercis- 
ing a practical sovereignty. A House so constituted could not indeed 
directly force its own measures through the House of Commons, but its 
veto would be permanent. It would be a close hereditary body into which 
no new blood could be introduced except on the actual lapse of a peerage. 
The commoner could no longer look forward to a peerage as the prize of 
public service. The Scottish peers could no longer acquire the status of 
peers of the realm. From Scotland arose a clamour that the bill was a 
breach of the Treaty of Union, and that if it were carried the Union itself 
would be challenged. Walpole appealed to the ambitions of the members 
of the House of Commons, excluded for ever from the prospect of being 
enrolled among the aristocracy. Sutherland's Peerage Bill was defeated, 
and the House of Lords remained an open body. In modern times such 
a defeat would involve the resignation of ministers ; but the modern theory 
was then unknown. Both Walpole and Townshend accepted office under 
the very ministers whom they had just opposed with all their might, and 
defeated. The fall of the Stanhope ministry was due to another cause. 

The Whigs under King William had created the great financial 
corporation of the Bank of England. Of the commercial corporations 
the greatest was the East India Company, which, originally associated 






THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 579 

rather with the Tories, had also become preponderantly Whig since its 

union with the Second East India Company. The Bank and the East 

India Company were both extremely useful to the Whigs, while a Tory 

Government could not with equal confidence rely upon their help. Hence 

when the Tories came into power in 17 10 they created another commercial 

association in the hope that it would serve them as the other corporations 

served the Whigs. This was the South Sea Company, with a commercial 

programme based upon the rights 

and privileges which were to be the 

reward of the peace which Harley and 

St. John at once set about negotiating. 

It was anticipated that the monopoly 

of the South Sea trade which was 

formally opened to England by the 

Treaty of Utrecht would soon bring 

immense wealth to the South Sea 

Company. The company, in return 

for the monopoly, took over the 

government debt of ten millions, the 

government appropriating to it for 

the paymejit of interest the proceeds 

of particular duties. 

There was in fact a substantial 

trade, and the position of the com- 
pany as originally constituted was 
reasonably sound. But shortly after- 
wards Europe was visited by an 
epidemic of speculative mania. The 
thing was not confined to England ; 
France went crazy over the fabric 
of crazy finance erected by Law of 
Lauriston. Until 1719 the South Sea 

Company so far prospered that its shares stood at a premium. Now at the 
close of the War of the Spanish Succession the National Debt amounted to 
more than fifty millions, and the annual charges thereon were more than 
three and a quarter millions. These figures seemed alarming, and there was 
a very strong desire to reduce the debt as rapidly as possible. But very 
little had been done in this direction by Walpole's institution of a sinking 
fund, made just before the Whig split. The South Sea Company now 
came forward with a proposal to take over another thirty millions of the 
National Debt, which would be converted into South Sea stock, and to pay 
seven and a half millions to the government, in return for which their 
existing privileges in the South Sea trade were to be expanded into an entire 
monopoly, and the expenses of management entailed by the scheme were to 
be provided for by the Treasury. Government adopted the scheme in spite 




Jet iaMA. uj-ha/- haft UntJwiksMf FaoU are Rumisnjj 
To JCumawr fad*t4 and CraMfy tAeir (Xwrvma- 

But Jonifi thecr mua/ifa IftopeJ WulComcfi) Jadt&fi 



A caricature of the day on the South Sea 
Company, 1720. 



580 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

of the open warnings of Walpole ; there were members of the ministry who 
did not go into the matter with clean hands, though others were perfectly 
honest in their belief in the soundness of the scheme. If it had merely 
attracted a sufficient supply of additional capital for extended operations 
the business might have escaped disaster or even have achieved a moderate 
success. But the public imagination was inflamed by wild rumours of 
incredible concessions made by Spain, and the huge profits to be anticipated. 
High and low, rich and poor, were gripped by the gambler's fever, and 
began to spend every available shilling on South Sea stock. The prices 
rushed up. On January 31, 1720, while the South Sea Act was under 
consideration, the market price of ^100 of South Sea stock was about ^130. 
A week after the Act was passed two and a quarter millions were sub- 
scribed at the price of ^300 for a nominal ^100 of stock. At the end of 
May the price had almost reached .£1000, and at Midsummer it reached 
.£1060. But in the meanwhile innumerable fraudulent companies had 
been taking advantage of the gambling frenzy to rob the credulous public, 
and in the light of the prosecutions which were instituted, the public began 
to wake up to the fact that it was being robbed. Stockholders of all kinds 
began to be as eager to sell as they had been to buy, and three months 
after reaching its highest point the South Sea stock had dropped again 
to what was after all the highly respectable figure of ^150. But the drop 
meant ruin to the vast numbers who had bought at the inflated prices. 
Their ruin entailed the ruin also of their creditors, and the creditor's 
creditors, and so in ever-widening circles the ruin spread. It was easy 
for the public to attribute the whole hideous disaster to the criminality of 
directors and the wicked ways of the Government, which had tricked them 
into believing that the concern was sound. It was easy to forget that the 
action neither of Government nor of directors had warranted the mad 
inflation of prices, though there were individual ministers and directors 
who had used their opportunities to feather their own nests. If Jacobites 
expressed an unholy glee over a catastrophe which seemed to portend the 
immediate downfall of the Whigs, they could hardly be blamed ; for every 
one who could be in the most remote degree suspected of having had a 
share in causing the disaster became the object of frantic popular exe- 
cration. 

But such critics were woefully out in their reckoning. The people 
turned for their saviour not to the Tories but to the ranks of the Whig 
Opposition. Townshend, Walpole, those who had joined with them in 
attacking the men and the measures of the Stanhope-Sunderland adminis- 
tration, were palpably free of all blame. Walpole himself had raised the 
voice of warning ; Walpole was a master of finance. If any man could 
minimise the disaster it would be Walpole. 

Walpole succeeded in his task. He was strong enough to refuse to 
yield to merely vindictive clamour, and adopt measures which would have 
appeased the popular rage for the moment at the expense of justice and 






THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 581 

without restoring public credit. The company itself was preserved with 
its nominal shares of ^ioo, once worth ^iooo, reduced to ^33. The 
private property of directors was confiscated, and provided some two 
millions for the immediate relief of the sufferers from the catastrophe. The 
Government's claim on the company for the promised seven millions was 
cancelled. The South Sea Company remained a going concern. As for 
the ministry, Ayslabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled from 
the House in disgrace. Sunderland was deservedly acquitted, but the 
bitterness of popular feeling forced him into retirement. Stanhope, con- 
spicuously honest and blameless, might have held his own, but was killed 
by the shock of the whole affair. Townshend and Walpole became the 
first ministers of the Crown. 

Ill 

WALPOLE AND THE SYSTEM 

Townshend and Walpole were connected by marriage. They had held 
together through the political vicissitudes of the last ten years, and for ten 
years more they remained colleagues. Their government was at first a 
partnership ; but neither was content to be second or merely equal to the 
other ; and the partnership developed into a rivalry which was only 
brought to an end when Townshend made up his mind in 1730 to leave 
the field to Walpole, since they could not longer work in harness together. 
But from the outset Walpole rather than Townshend filled the public eye ; 
for practical purposes Walpole controlled British policy from the end of 
1720 until 1739, and he remained nominally at the head of affairs for 
three years more. This long ministry of Walpole inaugurates the era 
during which the question of primary importance has been not who was 
king or queen, but who was Prime Minister ? Since the days of Charles I. 
and Buckingham it had hardly been possible at any time to name any one 
person as the minister of the Crown who directed the policy of the state. 
Before the seventeenth century ministers had been still more palpably the 
servants of the Crown, holding office at the pleasure of the Crown, and 
dismissed or disgraced or sent to the block if the Crown so pleased. But 
from Walpole's time onwards the sovereign has been virtually deprived of 
choice. He has hardly been able to refuse a minister pressed upon him by 
the leaders of the party dominant in parliament, still less to dismiss one 
who enjoys parliament's support or to appoint one whom parliament finds 
obnoxious. And almost at all times one particular minister has been 
decisively the chief of the administration, though not always the nominal 
figurehead for whom the title of Prime Minister has come to be reserved. 

The change however was gradual and unconscious. William III. chose 
his own ministers, merely modifying his selection in order to avoid ex- 
cessive friction in the machinery of government. It was a practical 



582 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

outcome of the struggle between Crown and parliament that parliament 
made its voice heard on questions of policy and of administration very 
much more energetically at the close of the seventeenth century than in 
the days of Plantagenets or Tudors ; the more or less tacit acquiescence 

of parliament was 
less easily obtained 
than in earliertimes. 
Hence to avoid 
friction it had be- 
come necessary to 
secure correspond- 
ingly a greater 
concord between 
ministerial action 
and parliamentary 
opinion. Theoreti- 
cally it was not 
necessary for minis- 
ters to be in agree- 
ment even with each 
other, butpractically 
it was becoming 
very inconvenient 
that it should not 
be so. If at any 
time during the 
reign of William or 
Anne all the minis- 
ters were taken 
from one political 
party, it was merely 
because such a 
selection seemed 
necessary at that 
particular time to 
prevent a deadlock. 
The Crown did not as yet recognise, popular opinion did not yet declare, 
that the power of the Crown to select ministers was restricted, except by 
the obligation not to choose men who were conspicuously obnoxious. 
Moreover, the power of the Crown was only slightly restricted even in 
practice. It is notable that changes of ministry did not usually follow 
upon general elections. When the Crown and the ministry were in 
harmony the electors gave a general support to the ministry. When the 
Duchess of Marlborough thoroughly dominated the queen, Whigs domi- 
nated the ministry, and an appeal to the electorate returned a Whig 




Sir Robert Walpole. 
[From the painting by J. B. Vanloo in the National Portrait Gallery.] 







THE HOUSE OF COMMONS UNDER SIR ROBERT WALPOLE S ADMINISTRATION 



From an engraving of the painting by Hogarth and Thornhill. Walpole stands to the 
left of Mr. Speaker Onslow. 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 583 

majority. When the queen shook herself free of the Duchess, Whigs were 
turned out of office, Tories took their places, and when there was a general 
election the electors returned a Tory majority. Politicians devoted them- 
selves more zealously to capturing the favour of the sovereign than to 
cultivating the goodwill of the electorate. 

Both the theory and the practice survived the Hanoverian Succession. 
But the change of dynasty produced new conditions. One of the two 
great parties was shattered. The interests of the whole body of Whigs 
were bound up with the security of the new dynasty. The interests of the 
new dynasty were bound up with the predominance of the Whigs ; and 
the Hanoverian Tories, without hopes of themselves forming a dominant 
party, were rapidly absorbed into the Whig ranks, more especially after the 
ignominious collapse of the " Fifteen." The Crown had not the will, and 
would not have had the power, to choose ministers except from among the 
Whigs. After the passing of the Septennial Act, Whig government was 
never really in danger ; even the South Sea Bubble confirmed a Whig com- 
bination instead of shaking it. Instead of a rivalry of parties, there was 
only a rivalry of Whig factions ; and the long ascendency of the Whigs 
under these conditions made it for ever impossible that a working ministry 
should be formed independent of party lines. Within the party the king 
apparently retained the power of selection ; but the prestige of the Crown 
was very much reduced by the fact that it was worn by unattractive and 
unpopular German princes, while the sentiment of loyalty, wherever it 
survived at all, was necessarily attracted to the legitimate king " over the 
water." 

Thus if the king was free to choose any Whig ministers he liked, it still 
remained necessary that he should choose men who would work together ; 
and the personal influence of the king proved to be no longer sufficient to 
induce ministers to work in political harmony when they were personally 
antagonistic to each other. Politicians continued to intrigue in order to 
obtain royal favour ; but the royal favour was wasted on any statesman 
who could not manage his colleagues or who could not manage parliament. 
This managing capacity was possessed by Walpole, and after Walpole by 
Henry Pelham. It was not possessed by their rivals, and therefore between 
1720 and 1754 Walpole was for twenty years the inevitable minister and 
Pelham for ten years. And after Pelham's death government fell into 
hopeless confusion until there was a coalition between Newcastle and 
William Pitt. The position of a minister was unstable unless he could 
secure the royal favour, though the royal favour was not sufficient to keep 
in power even a brilliant politician who lacked the art of managing his 
colleagues and parliament. 

Walpole, then, ruled the country for nearly nineteen years, and continued 
nominally at the head of affairs for nearly three years after he had lost 
the real control. With the exception of Lord Burleigh before him, and 
the younger Pitt after him, no other minister has held the chief power in the 



THE HANOVERIANS 

George I. , 1714. 

I 
George II. , 1727. 



Frederic, Prince of 
Wales. 

I 

George III. , 

1760. 



gard. 



William , 
Duke of Cumberland. 



If they set them- 



584 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

state for so long a time continuously or almost continuously. He retained 
the support of the Crown throughout that time, in spite of the fact that 
George I. and his heir were in constant antagonism, and it was generally 
expected that the accession of George II. would be followed by a complete 

change of ministers. Walpole main- 
tained his position because he was 
shrewd enough to know that the person 
who exercised the strongest influence 
over the mind of George II. was his 
very able queen, Caroline of Anspach. 
Walpole's rivals made the blunder of 
seeking alliance with the king through 
other ladies who enjoyed the royal re- 
But the latitude of George's morals did not disturb his wife's 
ascendency ; Walpole allied himself with Queen Caroline, and that alliance 
secured him with the king. His power was notably diminished when 
Queen Caroline died in 1737. 

Walpole managed his colleagues by overriding them 
selves up as rivals or attempted 
to defy his authority, they ceased 
to be his colleagues. At the end 
of his tenure of power every man 
of dangerous abilities or overween- 
ing ambition had joined the Opposi- 
tion, an Opposition united only in 
its antagonism to the minister. 
Walpole wanted not colleagues but 
subordinates, and he was strong 
enough to conduct the government 
through the mediocre subordinates 
who obeyed orders. 

The management of parliament 
was more complicated ; the method 
was corruption. Corruption could 
be applied in one form or another 
to individual members of parliament, 
to the magnates who controlled the 
elections in certain constituencies, 
and to the electorate itself in other 
constituencies. County members were returned by the independent votes 
of landowners, and here direct corruption was hardly available, except so 
far as it might procure the favourable influence of great county families. 
Of the boroughs a great number had already become in effect the property 
of some great magnate whom the voters could not venture to offend. 
Both Tudors and Stuarts had added to the number of boroughs small 




Queen Caroline, Consort of George II. 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 585 

towns especially in Cornwall, which practically acted under orders from 
the Crown. In other boroughs of magnitude the parliamentary elections 
were virtually controlled by the corporation, and corporations were cor- 
ruptible, even to the extent of openly selling the seat to the highest 
bidder. Individual members of parliament were corruptible. " All these 
men have their price," said Walpole as he surveyed the benches of the 
House of Commons, a remark which has been popularly translated into 
the saying, " Every man has his price." The price of course was not 
necessarily cash ; but Walpole acted without scruple on the general 
principle that votes in the House were to be bought, that the support of 
magnates was to be bought, and that the support of corporations was to 
be bought. Official places big and small were distributed for the satisfac- 
tion of influential persons. Hard cash passed when hard cash was re- 
quired. Walpole did not create the system ; Danby has a better title to 
the honour of having originated it ; as compared with his successors, 
Walpole was a mere dabbler ; still it was he who educated the public 
conscience into regarding corruption as a matter of course. No man ever 
bribed Walpole himself ; in that sense his hands were conspicuously clean ; 
but he was entirely without shame in his corruption of others. And thus 
he managed parliament. 

But there still remained a latent force which no ministry could with- 
stand if it were roused to activity, the force of public opinion. Ministers 
have often achieved and not so often retained power by awakening popular 
enthusiasm. Walpole and his school dreaded popular enthusiasm as a 
disturbing and unsettling factor. His great object was to prevent ebullitions 
of sentiment, to preserve an acquiescent apathy in the public, to "let sleeping 
dogs lie." For more than eighteen years he carried out that policy success- 
fully, though sometimes at the cost of surrendering measures which he 
regarded as being in themselves for the public good. After eighteen years 
it was a rush of popular feeling which swept him away, although he would 
not resign the helm which he could no longer control. Dux-ing those years 
his policy had consistently preserved the country at peace, while the storms 
of war swept over the continent. British commerce expanded under his 
enlightened financial administration. The nation piled up wealth which 
was to stand it in good stead. But the pursuit of material wealth as the 
summum bonum, the cultivation of moral indifferentism, the total divorce of 
politics from all idealism, threatened to debase the national character, until 
nobler leaders than Walpole reawakened a nobler spirit. 



586 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 



IV 

THE RULE OF WALPOLE 

Lord Hervey, writing memoirs of the earlier years of George II.'s 
reign, apologises for their lack of incident. There was no lack of incident 
in affairs on the continent, but Walpole, in spite of occasional strong 
pressure, managed to prevent Great Britain from being embroiled. It was 
in fact his very particular business to avoid incidents. The country was to 
enjoy the happy lot of having no history. Nothing was to be disturbed 
which could be left undisturbed. The French alliance, inaugurated under 
the Stanhope regime, was the best possible guarantee of peace. Under 
Stanhope also the domestic question of religion had been relieved of its 
acuteness by the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts. 
In the abstract it was quite unreasonable no doubt that dissent should carry 
with it any legal disabilities ; but the grievance was more theoretical than 
practical, since the great majority of Nonconformists had no conscientious 
objection to passing the very futile tests which the law imposed ; and even 
if they did break the law, they could practically count upon the passing 
of an annual Act of Indemnity which relieved them from any penalty. 
Walpole, therefore, discountenanced any attempts at re-opening a question 
which might arouse a slumbering fanaticism into a dangerous activity. 

For a moment the equilibrium was in danger of being disturbed when 
old king George I. died in 1727, for it was known that the new king's 
favourite among the statesman of the day was Carteret, who, at first a 
colleague of Walpole and Townshend, had been driven from office as a too 
clever rival. The ice cracked but it did not break ; Walpole, having won 
the support of Queen Caroline, was soon more firmly established than 
ever. 

The main features of Walpole's policy were negative ; he would not 
provide a handle for any one who sought to create discontent and disturb- 
ance ; he would not be seduced into a policy of intervention in Europe. 
The one direction in which he adopted a positive policy of reform was 
in that of commerce ; because he looked to commercial prosperity as 
the surest guarantee of political quietude. And here he could venture to 
be a reformer, though an exceedingly cautious one, because his already 
high financial reputation was convincingly confirmed by his management of 
the South Sea disaster. The country was wedded to the mercantile system, 
the doctrine of controlling trade so that British goods should be exchanged 
for foreign money rather than British money for foreign goods. Broadly 
speaking, imports were discouraged except from countries which took more 
than their value in exports, and they were discouraged also as competing 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 587 

with British products. On the other hand, British exports were taxed 
in order to keep down their prices in the home market for the benefit 
of the consumer, although in other cases the consumer was forgotten 
and the export was encouraged by bounties for the benefit of the pro- 
ducer. 

Walpole saw that the greatest economic gain would come from the 
maximum development of the volume of trade ; he wished to make London 
the great World Emporium. But he was true to his principles, disturbing 
no interests which were satisfied with the existing 
order, but might be dangerously excited by change. 
He reduced or removed taxes on exports, taxes 
on imports which did not compete with home pro- 
ducts, and taxes on raw materials which the home 
manufacturer wanted to buy at the lowest possible 
price. Experience had shown the risk and dis- 
advantages which arose from the dependence of 
the country on the Baltic trade for naval materials, 
since hostility on the part of the Baltic Powers 
tended to paralyse that trade ; so the production 
of naval materials at home and in the " Plantations" 
or colonfes was fostered by bounties. No com- 
mercial interests suffered, nor did the revenue 
itself suffer from the reduction of tariffs, because 
while the rate was lowered the corresponding re- 
duction in price brought an increased demand and 
an increase in the quantity of the goods on which 
the duties were levied. 

Yet the moment of greatest danger to Wal- 
pole's administration came with the financial pro- 
posal known as the Excise Bill. If it had not 
been called an excise bill no danger would have 
arisen at all. Excise is internal taxation ; as dis- 
tinct from customs duties, the taxation at the ports of goods on their 
embarkation or disembarkation. It had been introduced by the Common- 
wealth government, but applied only to the production and sale of spirituous 
liquors, and was exceedingly unpopular, though it was too useful a source 
of revenue to be dropped. Now, in accordance with the principle of en- 
deavouring to attract commerce and shipping to English ports, Walpole 
tried a very successful experiment with tea, coffee, and chocolate. Such 
goods were brought to English ports, in part, not for sale in England but 
for re-export. They paid a duty on being disembarked, and when they 
were re-embarked a corresponding rebate was allowed. In the case of 
tea, coffee, and chocolate under Walpole's experiment the goods were 
disembarked and stored at the ports without paying a duty, and of course 
were re-embarked without any rebate ; the duty, in short, became charge- 




George II. 

[From the portrait by R. E. Pine. ] 




Costumes in the early part of the 18th century. 
[From Nickoll's "View of Hampden Court."] 



588 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

able only when they were withdrawn from the port for home consump- 
tion. It was found that this change was productive of a substantial increase 
in the revenue. In 1733 Walpole proposed to extend the system to other 
goods, notably tobacco. But he called the measure an Excise Bill. The 
purpose of the bill was generally to develop commerce and specifically to 
obtain an increase of revenue whereby he would be enabled to diminish the 
land tax, and so to conciliate the interests which bore the main burdens of 
the nation under the system of finance introduced by the Whigs. But the 
name of excise spelt ruin to the measure. The Opposition conjured up an 
appalling picture of a universal system of excise, under which a vast army 
of government officials would penetrate into private establishments and 

would subject the citizen's 
private affairs to investiga- 
tion. Even the landowners 
took fright, preferring the 
burden of the land tax 
to the dreaded invasion 
which was to deprive every 
Englishman of his most 
cherished liberties. It was 
of no use to point out that 
the new army of officials 
would number not much more than a hundred, and that their duties would 
be practically confined to the ports. The country lost its head almost as 
completely as in the days of the Popish Plot. Walpole had absolutely no 
doubt of the value of his proposal ; he could have carried it in parliament, 
but it was evident that it could not be put in execution without much rioting 
and bloodshed. On such an issue a modern ministry in like circumstances 
would resign office. Walpole withdrew the measure, but did not resign. 
Common ministerial responsibility is taken for granted in modern times: 
but this was still so far from being the case in Walpole's day that some 
of Walpole's own colleagues took part in the agitation against the bill. 
Walpole held his own grip of power, and turned those colleagues, Pulteney 
and Chesterfield, out of office. They joined the ranks of the Opposition 
which gathered round the inefficient person of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 
who was on the worst possible terms with his father, as his father had 
been with George I. The whole episode affords the clearest possible demon- 
stration of the difference between modern conceptions of ministerial 
responsibility and those which prevailed in the first half of the eighteenth 
century. 

Not domestic but foreign affairs finally led to the destruction of 
Walpole's influence. We have seen that the outstanding feature of the 
Whig foreign policy after the death of Louis XIV. was alliance with France, 
because the peculiar circumstances made the French court under the 
Regent Orleans antagonistic to the new Bourbon dynasty in Spain, instead 






THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 589 

of drawing the two Bourbon powers together. The death of Orleans in 
1723 and the domination of the Duke of Bourbon which followed it did 
not in effect change the situation. For Bourbon wanted to get the young 
king married and to provide another heir to the throne, in order to exclude 
the new Duke of Orleans from the succession. But the Spanish princess to 
whom, with another object in view, the Regent Orleans had betrothed the 
youthful Louis, was only six years old — Orleans had hoped that the sickly 
king would die before an heir could be born to him. Precisely in order 
to prevent this, Bourbon broke the Spanish engagement, and married him 
to Mary, a daughter of Stanislaus, ex-king of Poland, so that the hostility 
of Spain to France was intensified by the slight. But then there came 
a change. Louis in 1726 declared himself of age, dismissed Bourbon, and 
entrusted the government to the already aged Cardinal Fleury. Fleury, 
like Walpole, was an advocate of European peace ; he believed in achieving 
his ends by diplomacy in preference to war, and so Fleury and Walpole 
remained in close alliance. But, on the other hand, Fleury had no reason 
whatever for antagonism to Spain. Since the king's marriage and the 
growing improvement in his health, the possibility that Philip of Spain 
would ever have a chance of asserting a claim to the Crown of France 
became remote. The unostentatious reconciliation with Spain bore fruit 
in 1733 m the secret u Family Compact" between the Bourbon powers; 
and the policy to which that compact pointed was the estrangement of 
Great Britain from Austria and the European ascendency of the Bourbons,, 
to be attained by the humiliation first of an isolated Austria and then of an 
isolated Britain. The scheme so far as France was concerned required 
the maintenance of friendly relations with Great Britain until Austria 
had been dealt with ; but the friendliness to Great Britain was merely 
assumed for ulterior purposes. The public knew nothing of these things, 
but the Family Compact was known to Walpole, and the great defect of 
Walpole's management of foreign affairs lay in his neglect to take measures 
either to counteract or to paralyse the Bourbon conspiracy. It was a 
matter of supreme good fortune for Great Britain that Fleury also 
neglected to provide the means for carrying out the scheme. Neither 
Spain nor France developed a navy fit to cope with the naval ascendency 
of the island Power, whose supremacy had been so thoroughly established 
in the last great war and confirmed in the subsequent years. 

Fleury's objects were advanced by the War of the Polish Succession 
which began in 1733 and was ended in 1737. The kingdom of Poland 
was elective, and all the European Powers ranged themselves on the side 
of one or other of two opposing candidates for the throne. Great Britain 
alone kept clear, though King George, as Elector of Hanover, was extremely 
anxious to plunge into the war in support of the Imperial candidate. The 
result was that Europe was deluged with blood, and all the treasuries were 
exhausted, while Britain remained at peace and accumulated wealth. Other- 
wise, the points in the redistribution of territory to be noted are that the 



590 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

king of Spain's second son was established as king of the Two Sicilies ; and 
that Francis, Duke of Lorraine, who was about to marry Maria Theresa, the 
daughter and heiress of the Emperor, received the dukedom of Tuscany, 
and in effect surrendered Lorraine itself to France. To the Emperor 
Charles the main satisfaction was found in the guaranteeing by the Powers 
of the Pragmatic Sanction, an instrument which, in defiance of precedent, 
recognised his daughter Maria Theresa as the heiress of the Austrian 
dominion. 

Six years after the Family Compact the whole fabric of Walpole's peace 




A satire on Walpole and his Administration about 1738. 
[This print, called " In Place," covers the whole political situation of the day.] 



policy had melted into thin air. Britain and Spain plunged into war, and in 
a very short time all Europe was once more in conflagration. But neither 
the Family Compact nor the intervening War of the Polish Succession was 
directly responsible for the Anglo-Spanish quarrel or the War of the Austrian 
Succession. British and Spaniards flew at each other's throats over a 
quarrel which had been standing for nearly two centuries ; neither people 
knew anything about Family Compacts. The War of the Austrian Succes- 
sion arose because the Emperor Charles VI. had neither a son nor a brother, 
nor even a nephew, and the king of Prussia discovered in the fact an 
opportunity for rounding off his dominions. Looking back on the circum- 



THE WHIGS AND WALPOLE'S ASCENDENCY 591 

stances in the light of later history, it is easy to observe that the two wars 
between 1739 and 1763 settled a question of vital importance in the 
world's history by giving to the British race a decisive supremacy over all 
European rivals in North America and in India ; but obviously, when the 
fighting began, the combatants did not realise the nature of the stake. They 
were not fighting for that stake. The French government ought to have 
been directed by the consciousness that there was not room either in North 
America or in India for both French and English ; the Bourbon conspiracy 
ought to have been one primarily for the suppression of Great Britain, 
the appropriation of the Western Hemisphere by the Bourbons, and the 
establishment of a French Empire in India. The political instinct of the 
British race ougJit to have led the nation to force the hand of a too timid 
minister and compel him to strike at Spain before the conspiracy was ripe. 
But, as a matter of fact, the conspiracy was aimed primarily against Austria, 
and only in the second place against British maritime supremacy, not con- 
sciously against British colonial expansion. The proof lies in the fact that the 
conspirators made no sort of preparations to challenge the British maritime 
supremacy in the one conceivably effective manner, namely, by the creation 
of rival fleets. Neither the French nor the British governments had given 
a second thought to the idea of dominion in India. And the British nation 
forced th& hand of the British minister, not influenced by an instinctive 
perception of great imperial necessity, but because it lost its temper. 
The Englishman who knew of the Family Compact, who was convinced 
that France would make common cause with Spain, who believed that his 
country would not be able to stand up against the united Bourbons, was 
the minister whose hand was forced, the minister who hated and dreaded 
the war, Robert Walpole. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE FALL OF WALPOLE, AND THE PELHAM 
ADMINISTRATION 

I 

THE WAR IN EUROPE 

Ever since the days of Elizabeth English seamen had persisted in a belief 
that they had a right to trade with the Spanish settlements in Central and 
South America and in the West Indies, whether the Spanish authorities 
sanctioned the custom or not. The Spanish authorities did not sanction 
the custom and punished offenders with a high hand, as they had an 
obvious right to do. The Treaty of Utrecht had at last made some 
limited concessions ; the British had the right of supplying negro slaves, 
and of sending one trading ship to the South Seas. But this provided no 
remedy for the still extensive illicit traffic. On the other hand, the Spaniards 
were charged with exercising the right of search not only within the 
proper area of Spanish waters but on the high seas. Both sides broke the 
law freely. A British captain named Jenkins declared that his ship had 
been boarded on the high seas and his own ear torn off by the Spanish 
revenue authorities. When further stories of outrage were multiplied, and, 
in spite of the conciliatory attitude of British ministers, no redress was 
forthcoming, the story of Jenkins's ear was resuscitated, a storm of popular 
indignation swept over the country, and Walpole found himself obliged to 
choose between declaring war and resigning. He would not resign, and in 
October 1739 war was declared. 

Walpole's inefficiency as an organiser of war was no less conspicuous 
than his ability as a peace minister. Knowing what he knew, it was his 
business to have been ready to strike and to strike hard the moment that 
war was forced upon Britain. The Spanish fleet might and should have 
been in effect swept off the seas at once. Instead Anson was despatched 
on the celebrated expedition in the course of which he circumnavigated the 
globe. Vernon was sent to the West Indies and the Spanish Main, 
Portobello was severely handled, but both at Cartagena and at St. Iago the 
British were badly repulsed owing to the discords between the naval and 
the military authorities. No great result could be looked for from such 
operations. But before any one else was drawn into taking part in the 
duel — for France was quite unprepared for a great naval struggle- — all 

592 



THE FALL OF WALPOLE 593 

the leading states in Europe found themselves fighting over the Austrian 
succession. 

The Emperor Charles VI. died. According to the Pragmatic Sanction, 
which every one had guaranteed more or less solemnly, Maria Theresa 
was to succeed to the whole of the Austrian dominion. Her husband, 
Francis, formerly of Lorraine, was a candidate for the Imperial Crown. 
But the Elector of Bavaria claimed the succession to large portions of the 
dominion, and was also a candidate for the Empire. France and Spain 
saw their advantage in the dismemberment, Great Britain and Hanover in 
the integrity, of the Austrian dominion. The electorate of Brandenburg, 
for some time ranking among the more powerful of the German principalities, 
had been erected into the kingdom of Prussia at the beginning of the 
century. Its second king, Frederick 
William I, had organised his army on THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION 

the hypothesis that the State was a Emperor Leopold. 

military machine. The country had I j 

not hitherto played the part Of a first- Emperor Joseph. Emperor Charles VI. 

rate Power; Frederick II., who had Maria Amelia, Maria Theresa, 

just Succeeded his father OI1 the throne, Charles of Bavaria Francis of Lorraine 

was now to prove the efficacy of that Ch ( a e r Xvii.). fS°l). 

military machine, and set Prussia de- 
finitely in ''the front rank of the European Powers. But to give Prussia 
that position, it was a strategic necessity for her to absorb the Austrian 
province of Silesia. While other Powers were arguing and arming, 
Frederick acted. His troops entered Silesia, for the possession of which 
he was able to concoct a claim sufficiently plausible for his purposes, and 
announced that if Maria Theresa confirmed him in possession he would 
defend the integrity of Austria. If not he would naturally support the 
claims of Bavaria. 

The permutations and combinations, and the withdrawals and reap- 
pearances of the various states who participated in the war as principals 
or as auxiliaries were complicated and confusing. The direct issue was 
between Maria Theresa and Charles of Bavaria, who was successful in the 
imperial election and became Charles VII. Charles claimed the main suc- 
cession in right of his wife, the daughter of the Emperor Joseph, the elder 
brother and predecessor of Charles VI. Since the male succession failed 
there was a good enough case for arguing that the daughter of the younger 
brother had no right of precedence over the daughter of the elder brother. 
Spain intervened in spite of her war with Great Britain, because the oppor- 
tunity offered of making good her claims to dominions in Italy ; Frederick 
intervened because he wanted to make good his claim in Silesia. Both 
these were claims against Maria Theresa as the heiress of the Archduke 
Charles ; that is, they were in respect of possessions which had gone to 
her father as the old Emperor Leopold's second son, not as the senior 
representative of the Hapsburgs ; consequently, from the point of view of 

2 P 



594- THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Charles VII. there was no objection. There was in short to be a dis- 
memberment of the dominion of Charles VI. in the interests of Bavaria, 
Prussia, and Spain. 

France tore up her guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction and intervened 
in the curious character of an auxiliary, because the disintegration of Austria 
was to the interest of the Bourbons. When the war was fairly opened in 
Silesia in the spring of 1741, Great Britain, under Walpole's guidance, 
would not intervene on the continent, and Hanover itself was forced into 
neutrality by the threat of a French invasion of the Electorate Saxony 
joined the Bavarian combination ; and if both France and Prussia had 
acted energetically against Austria Maria Theresa might have been forced into 
submission. But Frederick held off, after early successes, hoping to make 
a separate compact of his own with Austria ; and France held off because 
it did not suit her that Charles should have matters all his own way. 

At the beginning of 1742 Walpole gave up the hopeless attempt to 
keep the control of British policy in his own hands. He resigned ; in the 
new ministry foreign affairs were managed by Carteret, whose views coin- 
cided with the king's. An energetic foreign policy was adopted ; if it had 
not been so the Opposition would have thundered against the pusillanimity 
of the government. As it was, they thundered instead against a policy 
which was controlled by the interests of Hanover. It is to be observed, 
however, that George always wanted Maria Theresa to purchase the support 
of Frederick by conceding his demands in Silesia ; and Frederick in fact 
was bought off, after another victory in May, by the Treaty of Breslau, 
which gave him the better part of the coveted province. But it was not 
till 1743 that the British and Hanoverian troops played a conspicuous 
part — at the battle of Dettingen. King George, who commanded in person, 
blundered into a trap from which the army rescued itself more by sheer 
valour than by skill. George himself displayed conspicuous courage. 
This is noted as the last occasion on which a British monarch was himself 
present on the field of battle. 

At this stage some concessions on the part of Maria Theresa would have 
made possible a general peace, of which George would have had some right 
to regard himself as the real author. But comparative success made the 
Austrian queen disinclined for peace ; England was irritated against France, 
which was threatening to take up the cause of the Pretender, and it was 
easy to proclaim that the peace proposals were dictated in the interests of 
Hanover. The negotiations fell through, a fresh league was formed for 
carrying on the war, and in the next year, 1744, Frederick again intervened, 
having made a compact with France, which now dropped the fiction that 
her troops were merely acting as auxiliaries and definitely declared war. 
For hitherto, in spite of all the fighting, Great Britain and France had not 
nominally been at war with each other. 

The character of the contest was modified by the death of Charles VII. 
in January 1745. The new Elector of Bavaria came to terms with Austria, 




The House of Commons in 1742. 
[From a drawing by Gravelot engraved by W. J. White.] 



595 



596 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

and the Austrian queen's husband, Francis of Lorraine, became Emperor. 
But France was now palpably playing for her own hand, and once more 
the Netherlands became the theatre of conflict between the French armies 
under Maurice of Saxony, commonly called Marshal Saxe, an illegitimate 
son of the Saxon Elector, and the British Hanoverian and Dutch troops 
under the command of the Duke of Cumberland, the second son of King 
George. From the British point of view, the most notable event was the 
defeat of Cumberland at Fontenoy, a battle where the mismanagement of 
the commander was almost neutralised through the amazing courage and 

discipline displayed by the British troops, 
which were, however, little more admir- 
able than those shown by their foes. 

Again, however, the war was modified 
by the practical withdrawal from it on the 
continent of one of the combatants on 
each side. The great Jacobite insurrec- 
tion called British troops back to England ; 
and Frederick again retired in disgust 
because France was obviously fighting 
entirely in her own interest to the com- 
plete neglect of his. The French could 
and did overrun the Netherlands ; but 
then Austria was relieved of another enemy 
by the accession in Spain of the pacific 
King Ferdinand, who was much more in- 
terested in giving Spain itself a chance 
of peace and recuperation than in ex- 
tending the dominions of his half-brothers 
or carrying out the ambitions of the Family Compact with 




The despairing Frenchman at Louisbourg. 
[From a French caricature.] 



in Italy 
France. 

In fact, from the time when the Jacobite insurrection was over, and 
France and Austria had become practically the only active belligerents on 
the continent, the interest of the struggle for Great Britain is to be found 
in other regions. She had begun in 1739 with an ill-conducted maritime 
war against Spain, in which her greatly superior power was frittered away 
with very little result. In the next stage she had reasserted her maritime 
ascendency in the Mediterranean, paralysing the French and Spanish fleets, 
and thereby at least reducing Spanish activity in Italy. In the closing 
years of the war naval ascendency was more vigorously asserted; some 
blows were struck at the French fleet by Anson and Hawke ; and a 
foretaste was given of the coming struggle with France in North America 
by the capture of Louisbourg on the St. Lawrence. The fleet would 
again have turned the scale in favour of the British in the conflict which 
had opened in India had the general war continued for another year. 
But by 1748 Britain, Spain, France and Prussia all wanted to stop the 



THE FALL OF WALPOLE 597 

war from which Bavaria had long retired ; and a peace on the general 
basis of a restoration of conquests was forced upon Austria, though 
Frederick of Prussia retained his acquisitions. Apart from Silesia, Maria 
Theresa held what she had fought for. England restored Louisbourg to 
France in exchange for Madras, which the French had captured in India. 
Frederick of Prussia alone had gained positively by the war, by the actual 
acquisition of territory and the achievement of a great military reputation ; 
and this had been done at the cost of procuring the undying animosity 
of Austria. As for Spain and Great Britain, the cause of the quarrel 
which had started the original duel between them was not even alluded 



The^Wheel -Borrow Cry s of Euro 




European Sovereigns at Market, 1748. 

[From a print satirising the re-arrangements, bargainings, and restorations of European diplomacy 
at the end of the war of the Austrian Succession, in 1748.] 

to in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which brought the war to a 
close. 



II 



THE FORTY-FIVE 



The war which lasted from 1739 to 1748 was, from a British point of 
view, singularly futile and unproductive. But out of it arose, while it was 
still in progress, two episodes of signal importance. One was the last 
great effort of Jacobitism, the failure of which finally freed the country 
from the constantly lurking spectre of civil war. The other was the 
attempt made by the servants of the French East India Company to eject 
their British rivals, an attempt which presently recoiled upon their own 
heads. 

The ignominious collapse of the rising of 17 15 damped the somewhat 
lukewarm ardour of English Jacobites. In Scotland the enthusiasm of 



598 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

loyalty to the Stuarts remained alive among some of the Highland clans, 
and thrilled the romantic hearts of many ladies. The hope that a Stuart 
restoration would put an end to the Union with England was cherished 
north of the Tweed by many who cared nothing for the rights of dynasties. 
But the real fervour, the real sanguine belief that "James III. and VIII." 
would yet come by his own, was to be found chiefly among the exiles or 
the sons of the exiles who had departed from Limerick, or had taken flight 
after the u Fifteen." The king whose honest bigotry, combined with an 
obstinate stupidity, lost him the crown of England, was succeeded by the 
unfortunate prince who lives in the pages of Thackeray as a voluptuary 
who threw away a crown to gratify an amour. The real James was a 
meritorious person who habitually endeavoured to do what he believed to 
be his duty. He would not sacrifice loyalty to his faith for the sake of a 
crown, though half England would have turned Jacobite if he had turned 
Protestant. He conceived it to be his duty to regain the crown of his 
fathers, but, not without plenty of excuse, he was a melancholy pessimist, 
painfully conscious that he was fighting a losing battle. He was free from 
the conspicuous faults of his father, of his uncle Charles II., and of his son 
Charles Edward ; unhappily his personality was not inspiring but chilling. 
For that reason he was singularly ill-fitted to undertake the role which fate 
had thrust upon him. 

Jacobite plots and intrigues continued with varying activity during the 
thirty years which followed the " Fifteen." Half the English Tories would 
perhaps have liked to see a restoration ; many Tories and not a few Whigs, 
while regarding a restoration as a disturbing possibility, were anxious to 
stand well at the Stuart court if that possibility should materialise. Sanguine 
exiles were easily persuaded to believe that the Stuart cause was really 
popular in England, as it in fact was to a large extent in Scotland. Ireland 
was too powerless to count. But Jacobites in England and Scotland held 
to a firm conviction that no rising was possible without active military 
support from beyond the Channel. The long period of the French alliance 
made any such hopes futile, at least after Alberoni was dismissed from 
Spain. Hope revived when Britain was again involved in the War of the 
Austrian Succession. It was encouraged by France, since the British 
Government was thereby kept in fear of a Jacobite rising. In 1644, when 
France and Great Britain openly declared war, an invasion for the avowed 
purpose of effecting a Jacobite restoration was projected. Saxe himself 
was to have been in command, but at the chosen hour the transports were 
wrecked ; the moment passed, and the French decided not to divert their 
arms from the conquest of the Netherlands. 

But the fiery enthusiasm and the magnetic personality in which James 
was wanting were present in his son, Charles Edward, who was five-and- 
twenty years of age when he played for the great stake and lost. Hand- 
some, athletic, generous, endowed in full measure with that personal 
charm for which so many members of the Stuart family were conspicuous, 



THE FALL OF WALPOLE 599 

we may, after the event, still trace in him warning signs of those weaknesses 
which, after the great failure, hurried him to moral ruin ; yet it may be that 
they would never have developed if his venture had been crowned with 
success. 

The chance of French help was gone ; the prince resolved that at all 
costs he would strike his blow for the crown. Every trustworthy adherent 
of his cause warned him that 
the attempt would be mad- 
ness, that the English Jaco- 
bites would not rise, that the 
Highland chiefs themselves 
would not deliberately thrust 
their necks into a halter. In 
defiance of all advice the 
prince sailed from France 
with seven companions, slipped 
up the west coast, and landed 
in Moidart, the south-western 
corner of Inverness-shire, a 
remote point, beyond the ken 
of government officials. 
Thither he summoned the 
chiefs in whom he trusted. 
Some were wise and would 
not come ; they wished the 
cause well, but objected to a 
venture for which they saw no 
remotest prospect of success. 
Others came, each one bent 
on dissuading the prince and 
declaring that he himself 
would not be beguiled into 
an act of sheer madness. 
They might have held out if 
Donald Cameron of Lochiel 

had been able to resist the prince's appeal. But Lochiel gave way. If the 
prince was bent on ruin Lochiel would stand and fall beside him. Lochiel's 
action turned the scale; chief after chief came in. The news filtered 
through at last to Sir John Cope, the commander of the government 
forces. Cope marched into the Highlands, intending to throw himself 
between Charles and the doubtful clans of the North ; Charles slipped 
past him and marched upon Edinburgh via Perth, while the baffled Cope 
moved to Inverness to bring his forces back to Dunbar by sea. A party 
of dragoons was sent out from Edinburgh to meet the advancing High- 
landers, but fled in a panic without striking a blow — an exhibition 




The Jacobite march from the landing at Moidart to the 
battle of Culloden. 



6oo THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

known as the Canter of Colt Brigg. The city of Edinburgh offered no 
resistance, and in fact welcomed the prince, though the Castle defied him. 
While Charles held his court at Holyrood, Cope returned from the North 
and approached Leith. Guided across an intervening marsh on a night 
march, the Highlanders fell upon the government troops as the morning 
mists were breaking and scattered them in a discreditable rout at Preston- 
pans. Scotland was apparently in the hands of the Jacobites. 

For five weeks Charles delayed, beguiled by hopes of Jacobite risings 
and of a possible diversion from France. But while he delayed, the 
government in London was recalling troops from the Netherlands. The 
one chance lay in a dash to the South, in demoralising opposition by 
sheer audacity. Charles flung himself across the border at the head of his 
six thousand Highlanders, evaded first Wade and then Cumberland by 
sending each of them off on a false scent, and advanced as far as Derby. 
London was in a state of complete panic, and it was half believed that the 
approach of Charles would be the signal for the troops which still barred his 
advance either to join his standard or to run away. Charles would have 
dashed on, but less reckless counsels prevailed with the Highland chiefs. 
No Jacobites had joined them on the march, none had shown signs of 
rising, no Frenchmen had landed. They were far from their homes ; if 
they advanced the slightest check would involve irretrievable disaster. In 
bitterness of spirit Charles yielded, and the army turned its face northward. 
Perhaps there was one chance in a thousand of success if he had advanced. 
There was no chance at all when once he had begun to retrace his steps. 
Eight weeks after the Highland army had started from Edinburgh it was 
back again at Glasgow (December 26). The shrewd management of 
Duncan Forbes had kept the rest of the clans quiet. 

In the rearguard skirmishes which took place during the retreat the 
government troops had come off badly ; Charles now laid siege to Stirling, 
and at Falkirk a complete defeat was inflicted upon General Hawley, who 
was in command of the pursuing force, Cumberland having been detained 
in the South. But this was the last success. Disagreements and jealousies 
divided the prince's council, the siege of Stirling was abandoned, and the 
insurgents retired into the Highlands. Thither they were pursued as the 
spring came on by Cumberland, who maintained his communications with 
the coast, where a supporting fleet attended his movements. No fresh clans 
joined the Stuart standard. On April 15th the two forces were in close 
proximity, the government troops well fed and in good condition, while 
the Highlanders were on very short rations. Cumberland's army was 
drawn up on Culloden Moor. Charles attempted to effect a surprise by a 
night march, but the design was spoilt by delays. Nevertheless the cause 
was staked on a pitched battle. Under Montrose, under Dundee, under 
Charles himself, the Highlanders had repeatedly routed larger bodies of 
regular troops by the fury of their onset. For this Cumberland was 
prepared, his superior numbers enabling him to draw up his troops in 



THE FALL OF WALPOLE 601 

three lines. The rush of the Highlanders broke the first, but their advance 
was stopped and turned into a rout by the deadly volleys from the second 
line. Recovery was hopeless. " The clans of Culloden were scattered in 
flight," and Cumberland earned his nickname of the Butcher by the savage 
brutality displayed on the field and in the consequent penal operations. 
For after Culloden armed resistance was no longer possible, and the prince 
himself became a fugitive. The Duke merely scoffed at the pacificatory 




A contemporary plan of the Battle of Culloden. 



wisdom of Forbes. What followed was not war, but a hunt for fugitives. 
Hairbreadth escapes,' splendid deeds of loyalty and devotion, and the 
glow of romance, give a unique fascination to the story of the Forty- 
five. As a matter of rational calculation the great adventure was doomed 
to failure from the very outset, yet chivalry, loyalty, and sheer audacity 
had actually brought some six thousand clansmen from the wild Highlands 
of Scotland within measurable distance of winning back the British crown 
for the house of Stuart. 



602 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

III 

DUPLEIX 

In 1740 the ambitious Frenchman who in India was at the head of the 
affairs of the French East India Company was eagerly awaiting the oppor- 
tunity of a war between Great Britain and France to wipe out the rivalry 
of the British East India Company. Twenty years later the British East 
India Company had become no longer a mere body of traders but a 
territorial power, and French influence had received its coup de grace. The 
first stage of the conflict corresponds to the period of open war between 
Great Britain and France, which was brought to a close by the peace of 
Aix-la-Chapelle. 

It is not very easy to disabuse our minds of the idea fixed therein by 
Macaulay that Clive with a handful of Englishmen overthrew the Mogul 
Empire and set up in its place a British dominion over India. What Clive 
did perform in actual fact was one of the most astonishing feats recorded 
in history, but it was an intelligible feat, not a miracle. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Mogul Empire in India 
was very distinctly more wanting in the characteristics of a state than the 
Holy Roman Empire in Europe. During the reign of Henry VIII. the 
great Babar, a prince of mixed Mongol or Mughal and Turkish race, had 
burst into India from Afghanistan and founded the Mogul dominion over 
Hindustan ; that is, roughly speaking, the half of India which lies to the 
north of the river Nerbudda and the mouth of the Ganges. The empire 
was lost by his son Humayun and again almost recovered ; the re-conquest 
was completed by Humayun's son Akbar, whose glorious rule very nearly 
synchronises with that of Queen Elizabeth. The rule of Abkar's three 
successors covers the next hundred years ; that is, in effect, the seventeenth 
century. Under the third, Aurangzib, the great kingdoms of the South 
which had not been subject to the Moguls were overthrown, and the whole 
Peninsula from the Himalayas to the sea owned the sovereignty of the 
" Padishah," who parcelled it out into great vice-royalties or satrapies. But 
when Aurangzib died in 1707 the control of the empire by the Moguls 
became merely nominal. The satraps professed allegiance, but acted 
practically as independent sovereigns. The seat of the Padishah, the 
Great Mogul, was at Delhi, the traditional capital of the successive 
Mohammedan dynasties which for centuries had dominated the mainly 
Hindu populations of Hindustan ; but their phantom dominion was made 
yet more shadowy by the devastating invasion of the Persian conqueror, 
Nadir Shah, in 1739. 

Now we may take India as falling into five divisions — the basin of the 
Indus and its tributaries forming the Punjab and Sindh ; the basin of 



THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 603 

the Ganges forming the Delhi province, then Oudh, and then Behar and 
Bengal ; Rajputana extending between the Delhi province and Sindh ; 
Central India with the corresponding portion of the west coast ; and the 
great southern division called the Deccan. 1 The whole of the Deccan was 
under the sway of the viceroy called the Nizam, with his headquarters at 
Haidarabad. Subordinate to the Nizam was his lieutenant-governor, the 
Nawab of the Carnatic, the great province which stretches along the 
Eastern Sea and inland to the mountains of Mysore. Presently we shall 
find a Mohammedan adventurer setting up for himself an independent 
kingdom of Mysore ; but not yet. The great central district was 
dominated by the Hindu confederacy of the Marathas, having five centres, 
at Puna, Baroda, Indur, Gwalior, and Nagpur. Here and in Rajputana 
the ruling powers were Hindu ; in the Deccan and in the Ganges basin 
the viceregal dynasties were Mohammedan ; the Indus basin was as yet a 
debatable land where organised government hardly existed. All over India 
the Mohammedan was to the Hindu an alien conqueror, Turk or Afghan, 
who had laid his yoke upon the rightful lords of the Indian soil ; and the 
Hindu was to the Mohammedan an infidel and an idolater. In race, in 
language, and in religion the peoples of India were less homogeneous than 
the peoples of Europe, although the hybrid Hindostani tongue had grown 
up in the camps as a common language of general intercourse. 

Now, except in Rajputana, there was no single dynasty occupying a 
throne of importance which had been established for more than about 
half a century. There were minor Hindu rajahs, whose title may be 
translated prince or king, who traced their descent to a legendary past ; 
but the Marathas had only sprung into prominence during the rule of 
Aurangzib, and the nawabs and wazirs, the proconsuls, the governors or 
lieutenant-governors of great provinces, were the sons or grandsons of 
Aurangzib's great officers j the aged Nizam had served Aurangzib himself. 
The Mogul empire was a great congeries of undefined states which had no 
sense either of a common or of an individual nationality, and no loyalty 
to a royal house with a traditional title to honour and obedience. Each 
ruler was watching for a chance of self-aggrandisement, though the will of 
the Mogul was technically law and every viceroy was technically the 
Mogul's officer. 

On the skirts of this vast country, approximately the size of Europe 
without Russia and Turkey, were seated a few small communities of 
European traders. At no great distance from the two British posts, Forts 
William and St. George, better known afterwards as Calcutta and Madras, 
were the two main French naval stations of Chandernagur and Pondichery, 
each with some fortifications, and with a garrison of some scores of white 
troops; small communities, but each in a sort representative of the might 
of a great European nation ; rivals and competitors in trade, each eager to 

1 See the Map of India on p. 677. 



604 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

procure for itself from the native powers privileges to be withheld from 
the other. To the Frenchman; Dupleix, who became governor of Pondi- 
chery in 1741, the idea presented itself of acquiring a controlling influence 
at the courts of the great native potentates, with the corollary that the 
British rivalry was to be suppressed altogether. The two aims went hand 
in hand. Neither could be accomplished without the other, each was a 
means to the other. 

The British in India were not indisposed for a duel ; but the con- 
trolling authorities of the two trading companies at home saw only a loss 
of trade in any possible hostilities ; and neither Dupleix nor his rivals 
could look for much outside support. Dupleix secured the favour of 
Anwar-ud-Din, the Nawab of the Carnatic, from whom both the companies 
held their " factories" as tenants. Anwar-ud-Din (Macaulay's Anaverdy Khan) 
forbade the British to attack the French when a British squadron appeared 
in Indian waters. The British squadron went away, but Dupleix con- 
certed his plans with La Bourdon nais, the commandant at the French 
naval station of Mauritius. In 1746 La Bourdonnais appeared with a 
squadron and compelled Madras to surrender on terms. Anwar-ud-Din 
was deaf to the British appeal for protection, because he expected the town 
when captured to be placed in his own hands. But Dupleix now declared 
that there was no authority for the terms which La Bourdonnais had granted. 
He took possession on his own account; though La Bourdonnais retired 
in anger, feeling that his honour was compromised by the repudiation 
of his promise. 

Then came the critical moment for Dupleix. He refused to resign to 
Anwar-ud-Din. The Nawab, in wrath, despatched an army of ten thousand 
men to give the insolent Frenchman a lesson. But Dupleix had mastered 
the vital truth that a handful of disciplined white troops were a match for 
ten times their number of half disciplined oriental levies ; and further that 
natives, when drilled, disciplined, and led by European officers, and stiffened 
by a core of European soldiers, were not much less efficient than European 
troops in a contest with native armies. Anwar-ud-Din's great force was 
put to ignominious rout by a small band of Dupleix's sepoys with a few 
Frenchmen. This startling success at once gave the French a new and 
tremendous prestige. Anwar-ud-Din, without condescending to be afraid 
of the French, thought he might make them useful, and came to terms, 
agreeing to the retention of Madras by Dupleix. 

A hundred miles to the south of Madras, beyond Pondichery, the 
British occupied the fortified post of Fort St. David. The French were 
in possession of Madras and of numerous British prisoners of war, taken 
when that town surrendered. The capture of Fort St. David would clear 
the Carnatic; but the garrison repelled every attack in 1747. In the 
following summer the attacks were renewed, and were again repulsed by 
Major Stringer Lawrence, the very capable soldier who had been placed 
in command. By this time the British naval authorities had awakened to 



THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 605 

the benefits that might accrue from a more vigorous employment of naval 
supremacy. Admiral Boscawen appeared with a squadron in August, and 
now Pondichery was besieged instead of Fort St. David. After seven 
weeks, however, during which the defence was brilliantly conducted, and 
the siege operations were not, Boscawen had to withdraw his fleet because 
the season of the gales called the monsoon was at hand. During that 
season the squadron could neither keep the seas nor find adequate har- 
bourage on the coast of the Carnatic. Pondichery escaped. It can hardly 
be doubted that its fate would have been sealed in the following year by 
the presence of Boscawen's squadron ; but before hostilities were renewed 
came the news of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the order that Madras 
should be restored to the British. 

So closed the first phase of the contest. All the honours had fallen to 
Dupleix. The only success achieved by the British had been their stub- 
born defence of Fort St. David. The French, supported by a squadron, 
had captured Madras. The British, supported by a squadron, had failed 
to capture Pondichery. Dupleix's small forces had routed the great army 
of the Nawab of the Carnatic. Madras was restored to the British ; but 
only in consequence of orders from home, not from any military necessity 
apparent on the spot. 



IV 

CLIVE 

Peace was signed between Great Britain and France, and direct hostili- 
ties between the two companies in India were precluded. But Dupleix 
was bent on carrying out his own programme. The immense prestige 
which he had already achieved promised him an overwhelming influence 
in the native courts of the Deccan ; but the British still stood in the -way, 
and were not yet prepared to own themselves beaten. The contest was 
renewed on different lines, which avoided a formal breach of the Treaty of 
Aix-la-Chapelle. Dynastic struggles broke out in the Deccan ; French 
and British took the field as auxiliaries on opposite sides, and the British 
turned the tables on the French. 

Anwar-ud-Din, an old and able soldier, had been appointed Nawab of 
the Carnatic by the Nizam in 1740. During the thirty years preceding 
the Nawabship had been held by the able and popular administrator 
Sadutulla, then by his nephew Dost Ali, and then by Dost Ali's son. The 
assassination of this last was the cause of the appointment of Anwar-ud- 
Din. The family of Sadutulla was now represented by an admirable and 
popular prince named Chanda Sahib. For some years Chanda Sahib had 
been a captive in the hands of the Marathas. He had been on particularly 
good terms with the French. Dupleix now ransomed Chanda Sahib from 



606 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

the Marathas, with the intention of asserting his claims to the Nawabship, 
to which he, not Anwar-ud-Din, would have been appointed in 1740 had 
he at that time been at liberty. The powerful old Nizam at Haidarabad 
would have had to be reckoned with ; but at this opportune moment he 
died. The succession was seized by his son Nadir Jang, but was claimed 
by a grandson Muzaffar Jang, on the pretext that he had been appointed 
to it by the Lord Paramount of all India, the Mogul at Delhi. The two 
claimants to the Nizamship and the Nawabship, Muzaffar Jang and Chanda 
Sahib, made common cause against the Nizam and the Nawab in actual 
possession, Nadir Jang and Anwar-ud-Din. 

Dupleix gave the pretenders his active support, on the plea of loyalty to 
the Mogul. The combined forces marched against Anwar-ud-Din, who was 
defeated and slain, whereupon his title was taken up by his son Mohammed 
Ali. The victory had been largely due to the services of a French force 
under the command of the able General Bussy. Mohammed Ali threw 
himself into Trichinopoli and appealed to the British for support ; but the 
latter could do no more than send him some two hundred men. On the 
other hand, they sent a contingent under Major Lawrence to join Nadir 
Jang, the de facto Nizam, who was now invading the Carnatic in force. But 
intrigue and conspiracy came to the aid of Dupleix. Nadir Jang was 
assassinated. Muzaffar Jang was proclaimed Nizam, and when he was 
killed in a skirmish his place was taken by the French nominee Salabat 
Jang, who fell completely under the control of Bussy. The new Nizam, 
accompanied by Bussy, retired to Haidarabad to establish his position, and 
it appeared that Dupleix had only to crush Mohammed Ali and Trichinopoli 
to be completely master of the situation, with a decisively controlling 
influence over both the Nizam of the Deccan and the Nawab of the 
Carnatic. 

Hitherto there had been a singular absence of vigour and audacity on 
the part of the Madras authorities. But now there was a new governor, 
Saunders, and Saunders was able to appreciate the need of activity. He 
despatched reinforcements to Trichinopoli ; but, what was of still more im- 
portance, he listened to young Robert Clive. The story of Clive's youth is 
as familiar as that of Alfred and the cakes. The naughty boy, with whom 
his parents could do nothing at home, was sent out to India as a junior 
clerk or " writer " in the service of the East India Company. When the fight- 
ing began the young clerk at once volunteered. He had found his true 
vocation, and was allowed to exchange his writership for a commission in 
the company's service. 

Trichinopoli was now in imminent danger of falling when Clive pro- 
posed to Saunders to create a diversion by attacking Arcot, the capital of 
the Carnatic. Saunders was bold enough almost to denude Madras of its 
garrison, by despatching Clive with eight officers, of whom only two had 
been in action, a couple of hundred British soldiers, and three hundred 
sepoys, to make the attempt upon Arcot. The blow was secret, sudden 3S 



THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 607 

a thunderbolt. When Clive arrived before Arcot the amazed garrison was 
seized with panic and fled. Clive took instant possession and prepared to 
stand a siege. The desired effect was produced. Four thousand men 
marched from Trichinopoli, gathering reinforcements as they went, till a 
force of ten thousand men sat down before Arcot with its little garrison of 
five hundred. For 
seven weeks Clive 
held out, defying the 
efforts of the be- 
siegers, inspiring his 
own men with the 
magnificent de- 
votion which led 
the sepoys to make 
the spontaneous sug- 
gestion that the rice 
on which they were 
almost reduced to 
living should be 
reserved for the 
British ; the natives 
could live on the 
water in which it 
was boiled. 

The fame of the 
defence spread far 
and wide ; the pres- 
tige of the British 
suddenly rose higher 
than that of the 
French. Rajah 
Sahib, the com- 
mander of the be- 
siegingf orce, Chanda 
Sahib's son, feared 
that if Arcot did not 

fall at once there would be a great accession of the natives to the British 
side. On the fiftieth day there was a grand assault. With desperate valour 
the assault was beaten back. Rajah Sahib raised the siege in despair and 
began to retreat ; Clive's little band sallied forth in pursuit, scattered 
the great force at Ami, and again, having been joined by a force of 
Marathas, smote the foe at Kaveripak. 

The tide had turned. Major Lawrence, the defender of Fort St. David, 
was back at Madras after absence on sick leave. Clive and Lawrence together 
effected the relief of Trichinopoli, outmanoeuvred the opposing force, and 




Lord Clive in later years. 
[From a portrait by Gainsborough about 1773.] 



608 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

compelled it to surrender. Chanda Sahib was murdered, and Mohammed 
Ali was Nawab of the Carnatic. 

Bussy was still dominant at Haidarabad, and the resourceful Dupleix 
was still by no means beaten. But Dupleix was after all a subordinate ; 
his policy no longer found favour with the authorities in France, and his 
recall in 1754 was a fatal blow. Dupleix himself would not in the long 
run have been able to win, because when once Great Britain had become 
thoroughly alive to the importance of the struggle in India, a new war with 
France, which was inevitable, would enable her to exercise her sea power 
with decisive effect. Even apart from sea power the diplomatic talents of 
Dupleix would hardly have prevailed against the military genius of Clive. 
But when the actual final struggle came the French had lost Dupleix ; and 
the renewal of war between France and Great Britain had brought into the 
field the naval power which was not available when the two nations were 
nominally at peace. 



V 

AFTER THE WAR 

The ministry which was in office in England when the peace of Aix-la- 
Chapelle was signed was that which had been nicknamed the Broad Bottomed 
Administration on account of its comprehensive character. Walpole had 
retained office on the outbreak of the war nine years before ; but his posi- 
tion became so hopelessly untenable that even he was forced to resign at 
the beginning of 1742. The nominal chief who succeeded him was 
Wilmington, while the real head of the government was Carteret. But 
Carteret was absorbed in the game of European politics which rarely 
interests, or is understood by, the majority of Englishmen. He ignored the 
necessity of placating parliament and his own colleagues ; his " Hano- 
verian" measures were easily held up to popular execration; he had no 
personal party ; his position was undermined by the Pelhams, of whom 
the younger, Henry Pelham, was a master of the arts of conciliation, while 
the elder, Newcastle, thoroughly understood jobbery, and very little else. 

Pelham managed to obtain the support of politicians whom no one else 
could reconcile ; he silenced the most dangerous critics by giving them 
office, and he clung to Walpole's principle of doing nothing in preference 
to arousing excited hostility. In fact he regarded it as his business not 
to carry out any particular policy, but merely to keep the machine running 
with as little friction as possible. 

To the Pelham administration, therefore, fell the important task of the 
pacification of Scotland after the " Forty-five." The great insurrection had 
been made possible by the survival in the Highlands of the clan system, 
the Celtic equivalent of the feudalism which was bred from the contact of 



THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 609 

the Roman and the Teuton. As feudalism in Scotland had attained a 
completer development than in England, owing to the comparative weak- 
ness of the central authorities, so feudal law survived in the Scottish 
Lowlands and gave to the great landowners the Heritable Jurisdictions, 
legal powers over their tenants which overrode the ordinary law, and 
sometimes even powers of life and death. But in the Highlands these 
legal powers were made very much more formidable, because the land- 
owner was the chief of a clan bound to his service and to his obedience 
by the closest traditional ties of devotion. The Heritable Jurisdiction 
recognised by the law was merely a partial recognition of the relations 
between the chief and the clansmen, which were rooted in custom and 
sentiment, which counted for much more than mere law. The abolition 
of these jurisdictions which, somewhat in despite of the Act of Union, 
followed the u Forty-five," put an end to the authority of the chief over his 
clansman so far as the law was concerned. But it was not after all the 
most important factor in the change which took place. Some of the chiefs 
lost their lands by forfeiture, others were driven by impoverishment to sell 
them ; and there were no bonds which linked the clansmen to the new 
lords of the soil, who were objects not of devotion but of hostility. The 
clan sentiment was weakened by the abolition of its outward and visible 
sign when^the wearing of the tartan was prohibited. With vigorous disarma- 
ment, the improvement of roads, and the establishment of garrisons, it 
was no longer possible to carry on the old methods of freebooting. The 
Highlander who suffered what he regarded as an injury could now appeal 
for redress only to the law, not as in the old time to his own chief as his 
natural champion. In fact, the law at last penetrated into the Highlands, 
law with the sanction of physical force too strong for the resistance of the 
broken-up clan organisation ; custom, hitherto more powerful than law, 
had lost its most vital sanction, loyalty to the chief, and so the strongest 
barrier which had hitherto kept the Highlanders as a people apart was 
broken down, and the way was made ready for their gradual amalgamation 
with the " Saxons." 

Another measure followed after an interval of some years, which perhaps 
in the long run served still more effectively to create a sense of national 
unity. Not without hesitation on the part of the government, extension 
was given to an earlier .experiment by which a regiment of Highlanders had 
been raised to form part of the regular army. The Highlanders, with the 
warrior tradition behind them, found a scope for their martial predilections 
in the new Highland regiments which were raised. Fighting shoulder to 
shoulder with Lowland Scots and English, they acquired a sense of 
comradeship on the one side, and on the other created a respect for their 
military qualities, which transformed the old hostility into a spirit of generous 
emulation. Those results were not felt immediately, but they have made 
their mark in many a stricken field. 

Apart from the pacification of Scotland three measures stand to the 

2 Q 



610 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

credit of the Pelham administration. The first was the creation of the 
consolidated stock, which ever since has been known as a Consols." The 
high interest payable on the National Debt was reduced in respect of some- 
thing over fifty millions to 3^- and then to 3 per cent., and in the following 
year, 1751, a group of nine loans was consolidated into 3 per cent, stock. 
The success of the scheme was a demonstration of the prosperity of the 
country and of the credit of the government ; though this latter must have 
been in part at least due to the fact that no one was any longer afraid of 
that possibility of a Stuart restoration, which for fifty years had acted as a 
deterrent, however slight, to investment in Government Stock. Not only 
was the reduced interest accepted by the stock-holders, but the stock itself 
stood at a premium. 

The second measure was the reform of the Calendar. A century and 
a half before, the revised Gergorian Calendar, named after Pope Gregory 
XIII., began to be adopted in Europe. It was observed that twenty-five 
leap years in the hundred were one too many, or all but one too many. 
To bring matters right it was necessary in the first place to cancel some 
days, and in the second place to omit the century year from the leap 
years ; and in the third place it was held advisable to adopt the popular 
New Year's Day, January 1, in place of the ecclesiastical New Year's Day, 
the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. The reformed Calendar was not 
adopted in England until 1752, when the eleven days between 2nd and 14th 
September were dropped ; that is to say, 2nd September was the last day 
reckoned in the old style, the day following it being September 14th new 
style. From thenceforth also we escape the confusion caused by the un- 
certainty whether dates upon documents in the first three months of the 
year followed the old or the new style. For instance, taking January 1 as 
New Year's Day, Charles I. was beheaded on January 29, 1649 (N.S.). But 
taking March 25 as New Year's Day, he was beheaded on January 29, 1648 
(O.S.). Private practice varied, though officially "old style" was retained, 
so that it would be impossible to tell except from internal evidence whether 
a private paper dated January 29, 1649, was dated on the day of the 
beheading of Charles I. or twelve months afterwards. After 1752 there 
was no more ambiguity. The carrying of the bill which brought Great 
Britain into line with nearly all Europe was largely due to Lord Chester- 
field, a peer best known to posterity by the volume of Letters to his Son, 
which might be called a vade mecum for a young gentleman who was in- 
tended to pass through life with perfect manners and no morals. A higher 
but less remembered title to honour was derived from Lord Chesterfield's 
brief tenure of the Irish Deputyship, an office in which he distinguished 
himself by a complete disregard for the corrupting influences which 
generally at that time controlled the government of Ireland. 

The last of Pelham's measures which deserves notice is Lord Hard- 
wicke's Marriage Bill, which abolished in England the opportunities for 
surreptitious marriages by imposing heavy penalities on any clergy- 



THE PELHAM ADMINISTRATION 611 

man who performed such ceremonies without either the publication of 
banns or the production of a licence. From this time Gretna Green 
assumed a romantic prominence as the refuge of young runaway couples ; 
since once across the Border the fugitives might celebrate their marriage 
under Scots law. The object of course was to prevent young girls from 
being enticed into elopements by fortune-hunting adventurers. 

Pelham did what he was fit to do. He kept the machine running, not 
brilliantly, hardly even efficiently, but with a minimum of friction. But in 
1754 he died. The storm-clouds were lowering, and Britain had great 
need of a strong and far-sighted leadership. Such leadership was not to 
be looked for in the man who succeeded Henry Pelham as the head of the 
administration, his brother Newcastle. 



CHAPTER XXV 

EMPIRE 

I 

THE GROUPING OF THE POWERS 

The storm-clouds were lowering not only for Great Britain but for all 
Europe. For two conflicts were inevitable. Frederick of Prussia had 
won for his country a new position among the nations at the cost of the 
bitter hostility of Austria, and it was quite certain that sooner or later he 
would have to fight for his life. British and French colonists in America 
and British and French traders in the East had begun a conflict for 
dominion which sooner or later would have to be fought out to the bitter 
end. Whether those two conflicts would be kept separate or would be 
merged together, and how, in the latter case, the Powers concerned would 
combine, were the great questions of the hour. 

The question at issue in America was plain to view. From Nova 
Scotia on the north to the border of the Spanish Florida on the south the 
seaboard and the region inland to the Alleghanies were occupied by some 
two millions of British colonists, constituted as a number of independent 
states having no common central government, in most respects autonomous, 
but all ultimately subject to the control of the Crown and parliament at 
Westminster. Those two million colonists intended to expand westwards 
until one day they should reach the Pacific Ocean. But on the north the 
French occupied the basin of the St. Lawrence with their colony of Canada, 
and in the south they had planted the colony of Louisiana at the mouth of 
the Mississippi. The French had carried their exploration along the 
Mississippi itself and its great tributary the Ohio, which flows from north 
to south, its sources lying at no great distance from Lake Erie and Lake 
Ontario, the most easterly of the group of the great lakes out of which the 
St. Lawrence flows. The French claimed these two river basins ; in other 
words, the whole belt of territory running from the mouth of the St. Lawrence 
on the north-east to the mouth of the Mississippi at the south-west. If 
that claim were admitted the British colonists would be cooped up between 
the French and the Atlantic ; the French could expand westwards and the 
British could not. On the other hand, the British claimed the right of 
free expansion westwards, which in effect would have restricted the French 
to expansion in the modern Dominion of Canada, leaving them in the 

612 



EMPIRE 613 

south very little more than the mouth of the Mississippi. There was no 
possibility of compromising these rival claims ; one or other of the parties 
would have to be driven off the field. 

The number of the French colonists was much less than that of the 
British ; primd facte, if the two sets of colonists were left to fight the 
matter out between themselves, the British colonists ought to have been 
secure of victory. Had they enjoyed a common central government and a 
standing army there could have been little doubt of the issue. But they 
were subject to no common direction, and their fighting forces consisted in 
the separate militias of the separate colonies, organised chiefly for defence 
against the Redskins, and all having the strongest objection to serving 
outside the borders of their own particular state. The French in Canada, 
on the other hand, were under a single directing head j and the head at 
this time was a man of genius, both military and administrative, the 
Marquis de Montcalm. Moreover, a factor in the situation was provided 
by the Red Indian tribes, who, for the most part, were on better terms with 
the French than with the British. Hence it is by no means clear that the 
British would in fact have had the better in a straightforward contest. 

But in effect, however inert Great Britain and France might be, 
however little disposed to give serious attention to colonial questions, it 
was not possible that they should abstain altogether from intervention in 
the quarrels of the colonies. It is obvious that if they intervened the effective 
employment of sea-power would determine the issue precisely as it would 
determine the issue in India. Both in the west and the east the rivals on 
the spot were fairly well matched, and the issue, as between them, would 
turn very largely on the comparative capacity, diplomatic and military, 
of the leaders on the spot. But in both regions, if one party received 
energetic support from home and the other party did not, that support 
would more than counterbalance any local superiority. In both regions 
it followed that nothing but flagrant mismanagement could deprive the 
British of ultimate victory, if they made use of their naval ascendency to 
prevent the arrival of French reinforcements and to carry reinforcements 
to their own people. 

Now if we turn to Europe, the one thing certain there was that the 
Austrian government was set on the destruction of Prussia, or at the 
very least on the recovery of Silesia. And Prussia had at least one other 
enemy in the Russian Tsarina Elizabeth. By this time both Holland and 
Sweden had dropped out of the ranks of the Powers which had to be 
reckoned with as of first-class importance in European complications. 
But at the beginning of the century Peter the Great had set about the 
organisation of the vast but incoherent Russian dominion, at least semi- 
barbaric in its composition, into an empire approximating to Western 
models. The new Power had not been greatly concerned with the rivalry 
between Hapsburg and Bourbon, the "balance of power" which loomed 
so large in the eyes of Western statesmen. Still less was she concerned 



6 14 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

with the over-seas rivalry between Great Britain and France, which had not 
yet been fully realised even at Versailles and Westminster. But she was 
concerned with the Turks and Poland, and for that reason was touched by 
the affairs of Austria and of Prussia. Her power was an incalculable 
quantity, and her intervention might weigh enormously in the scales. 

As matters stood in 1748, Prussia and France were in alliance, and 
Austria and Great Britain were in alliance. Austria and France were 
traditionally hostile. According to all tradition, therefore, it was to be 
anticipated either that France and Great Britain would fight out their own 
duel and stand aloof from the Austro-Prussian quarrel, or that France 
would support Prussia and England would be on the side of Austria, 
though in a very half-hearted fashion, since she had no ill-will whatever to 
Prussia. Austria, on the other hand, could count on the good-will of the 
Tsarina because of Elizabeth's personal hatred not of the Prussian state but 
of Frederick himself, since he had been unable to resist the temptation 
to make sarcastic comments on her morals. Spain would in no case be 
brought into the embroglio so long as the present King Ferdinand remained 
on the throne. 

At Vienna Maria Theresa had for her minister a clear-sighted states- 
man, Kaunitz. At Berlin all things were directed by the keenest brain and 
the readiest hand in Europe. At Versailles there ruled an autocrat who 
neither had statesmanship himself nor knew how to choose statesmen to 
help him, a king who was completely under the influence of his mistress, 
the Pompadour. In London the administration was a mere chaos ; the 
Government was incapable of framing a policy, or of keeping consistently 
to any definite line. To Kaunitz it appeared that from the Austrian point 
of view the attitude of England was of less consequence than that of 
France. France, neutralised or brought into alliance, was worth more 
than an alliance with the British, who, in the last war, had repeatedly urged 
Maria Theresa to concede the unwelcome demands of the king of Prussia. 
France might be amenable because, among other reasons, Frederick had 
enraged the Pompadour very much as he had enraged the Tsarina. 
Kaunitz's plan was to combine Austria, Russia, and France for the 
destruction of Prussia. Saxony too would be drawn into the net, and the 
Hanoverian connection was more likely to be an embarrassment to Great 
Britain than a help to Frederick. Kaunitz's diplomacy was effecting a 
revolution in the system of European alliances. Frederick, preparing for 
a life and death struggle, preferred a British to a French alliance, because 
in the last war the French had very obviously neglected his interests to 
pursue their own ends ; and British subsidies, extremely useful to a poor 
country engaged in a costly war, would at any rate be expended in the 
manner most useful to Prussia. Great Britain merely drifted, and 
ultimately found herself in alliance with Prussia and at war with the 
European coalition, while ministers themselves hardly understood how that 
position had been arrived at. 



EMPIRE 615 

In the two years of drifting which passed between the death of Henry 
Pelham and the outbreak of the war, the one international fact forced to 
the front was the inevitability of a contest in America. In India affairs 
quieted down with the recall of Dupleix. Robert Clive was in England, 
trying to get himself into parliament, while the two companies had 
agreed to abstain from meddling with the native powers and were at any 
rate in a state of truce. But in America the Acadian question was acute, 
since the French and British frontiers had not been defined, and the 
French population within the unquestionably ceded territory were kept 
in a state of restless disaffection towards the British government by the 
French Canada. Moreover, the aggressive policy was in active progress ; 
the French had already set to work to create a chain of forts extending 
from the great lakes down the line of the Ohio. The British colonists had 
attempted to force them back, but had the worst of the encounter. In 
1754 Benjamin Franklin propounded a scheme for federating the colonies, 
which would have provided for united action under a common central 
government ; but the spirit of particularism was too strong and the 
scheme was rejected. It became necessary therefore to appeal to the 
home government. 

The appeal was answered by the despatch to America of a couple of 
regiments under the command of General Braddock, a valiant veteran who 
understood the formal methods of fighting practised on the European 
continent, but knew nothing of backwoods warfare. The French govern- 
ment responded by preparing and despatching reinforcements to Canada, 
though there was no declaration of war. Nevertheless Admiral Boscawen 
received orders to cut off the French expedition ; this was at the end of 
April 1755. A second fleet was also being prepared to take the seas 
under Hawke. At this time the British ministers were still under the 
impression that what they had to fear was the alliance, not yet formally 
abrogated, between France and Prussia. George was desperately afraid 
that Frederick would be moved to attack Hanover, and the Government 
negotiated both with the Tsarina and with Austria for the protection of 
Hanover and the Netherlands, in case the colonial struggle between France 
and Great Britain should issue in an attack on those regions by France and 
Prussia. The Tsarina had no objection to being subsidised for an attack 
upon Prussia ; but Austria rejected the proposals, which would obviously 
have destroyed her 'own private scheme of securing the neutrality if not 
the actual co-operation of France in an attack upon Prussia itself. 

Bad news accumulated. Boscawen failed to intercept the French 
expedition, and Braddock, marching against the French post of Fort 
Duqesne, was ambushed and killed, and his force was cut to pieces. The 
only British success, if success it can be called, was the effective seizure 
of Acadia by the deportation of the French, commemorated a century later 
in Longfellow's poem Evangeline. 

Now the thing that King George and his ministers wanted was to 



616 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

secure the neutrality of Prussia, the supposed ally of France. To that 
end they had obtained the convention with Russia, which was to expose 
Prussia to Russia's immediate attack if she moved against Hanover in the 
French interest. To this end also the Convention of Westminster was now 
negotiated with Frederick, directly binding him to neutrality. Frederick 
had no inclination at all to be dragged into a war for the extension of the 
French colonial empire, a war in which he could not choose his own time 
for action, and in which he could by no means count on being effectively 
defended by France against Russia and Austria, which would quite certainly 
attack him at their own convenience, 

Frederick accepted the convention in January 1756 ; with decisive, but 
perhaps unexpected, results. When the Tsarina learnt of it she became 
extremely angry, and Vienna was no longer in doubt that Russia would 
join actively in the destruction of Prussia. It was decisive moreover for 
France. Since she could no longer use Prussia as a weapon against Great 
Britain, she would join Austria and secure herself against Austrian interven- 
tion on the side of Great Britain. Besides, the superstitious Louis had an 
idea that he could compromise with Heaven for his private immoralities by 
joining a Catholic Power in attacking Protestant states. The old system 
of alliances and antagonisms was completely broken up, and it had be- 
come inevitable that Great Britain and Prussia should stand together in the 
coming struggle. 

The almost unparalleled inefficiency of the British Government would 
have been absolutely ruinous if it had not been matched by that of France. 
The destruction of Prussia was no business of France. Her business was 
to maintain Prussia in Central Europe as a counterpoise to Austria, not to 
join in the attempt to restore an overwhelming Austrian ascendency. By 
allowing herself to be seduced into the Austrian alliance, she was drawn 
away from devoting her energies whole-heartedly to the duel with England. 
For the purposes of that duel it was imperative that she should organise 
her fleets to their highest capacity, while Great Britain's actually very 
superior sea-power was neutralised by incompetent administration. She 
would have had nothing to fear from Austrian intervention ; the real 
question for her was whether the preservation of Prussia called for her 
own intervention in spite of the British duel. She chose instead to ex- 
haust herself in an attack upon Prussia, from which she could derive no 
advantage, while its inexpediency was certainly not counterbalanced by any 
moral considerations. And she neglected her navy until the British ad- 
ministration had been permeated by a new spirit which restored the British 
fleet to the plenitude of vigour that made its supremacy unassailable. 

Not by far-sighted policy, but by drifting along in complete misappre- 
hension of the whole situation, the British Government blundered into 
the alliance with Prussia ; whereby in effect Great Britain got the help of 
Prussia and Hanover in fighting France. France suffered more from that 
combination than she would have suffered from a British alliance with 



EMPIRE 617 

Austria ; but it was not in the least what the British Government had in- 
tended. And apart from this, although it was perfectly well known that war 
with France for the colonies was inevitable, no proper precautions were 
taken. The garrisons of Minorca and Gibraltar were inadequate ; neither 
Port Mahon nor the Rock was in fit condition to resist a strenuous attack, 
and the fleet which ought to have been ready to sweep the seas was not 
made ready at all. 

These things were owing to the fact that the Government had no real 
head, no one to guide it, with clear and definite aims or a clear and 
definite idea of methods. Newcastle's idea of policy was party manage- 
ment ; not the same thing, though a necessary means to it. He was too 
jealous to co-operate even with the men of ability who were nominally 
members of his administration. His most formidable critics in the House 
of Commons were Henry Fox and William Pitt, who both spoke from the 
government benches, until presently Pitt went out of office, and Fox was 
silenced as a critic in the House by official advancement and in the 
Cabinet by the fear of losing his emoluments. The man to whom the 
people of England turned their eyes was Pitt, whom neither Newcastle nor 
the king could endure ; and Pitt was entirely without the qualities of a 
party manager, nor would anything induce him to condescend to the 
business of party management. 



II 

MISMANAGEMENT 

In the spring of 1756 the Austrian combination for the destruction of 
Prussia was not yet avowed ; it was not intended that it should be 
unmasked until all the Powers concerned were ready to strike in concert. 
But war between France and Great Britain was obviously imminent. The 
country was on the verge of panic over the expectation of a French 
invasion ; and the ministerial idea of defence was to bring over troops 
hired from Hanover and Hesse — so little care had been given to the 
organisation of a fighting force. Pitt's demands for a reorganisation of 
the militia had been rejected. It was known that a French fleet was on 
the point of sailing from Toulon, though its destination was uncertain ; and 
Admiral Byng was sent with ten sail of the line to take care of the 
Mediterranean. By the time that he arrived, in May, a slightly superior 
French fleet was already engaged in besieging Port Mahon. After an 
indecisive engagement on May 19th, Byng came to the conclusion that 
the risks of attempting to raise the siege were too great. He retired to 
protect Gibraltar, and, at the end of June, Port Mahon surrendered. 

The loss of Minorca excited a wild storm of rage in England, where 
ministers clutched at the chance of diverting some of the indignation from 



618 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

themselves by making Byng the scapegoat. They did not save themselves. 
Matters were not improved for them by unsatisfactory news from America. 
Fox resigned, Newcastle could not face both Pitt and Fox in opposition, 
and under the Duke of Devonshire a ministry was formed in which Pitt 
and a group of his connections, Lord Temple, Legge, and George Gren- 
ville, found places, by no means to the satisfaction of the king. Byng 
was court-martialled and ordered to be shot, in accordance with a 
technical regulation, although the court entirely acquitted him of cowardice, 
and accompanied the sentence with a protest against the rigour of the 
law. Public opinion admitted no plea for mercy, though Pitt risked his 
popularity by advocating the cause of the unlucky admiral ; and Byng 
was shot. 

The Devonshire ministry was moved to vigorous action by Pitt. His 
Militia Bill was passed, the army was increased, a couple of Highland 
regiments were raised, and a substantial force was despatched to America. 
Large supplies were voted, including a subsidy for Hanover, although 
throughout Pitt's career he had clamoured against the subsidising policy. 
Yet the ministry could not hold its own. Pitt was dismissed at the end of 
March, chaos supervened, and after a serious of abortive attempts to pro- 
duce a combination which could at once command the confidence of the 
country and control parliament, George, Newcastle, and Pitt realised that 
the only possible Government was a coalition between Pitt and Newcastle, 
in which Pitt had a free hand for action and Newcastle for patronage. The 
most creditable feature in the not discreditable career of George II. is the 
loyalty with which he stood by a minister whom he had always detested 
hitherto, from the moment that he learnt to trust him. Fox, who had been 
Pitt's most dangerous rival so far as ability was concerned, was quieted 
by the lucrative post of Paymaster. The formation of the Pitt-Newcastle 
administration was the beginning of the turning of the tide, which till then 
had been setting unfavourably enough for Great Britain. Even then some 
months elapsed before the turn of the tide made itself convincingly felt. 

The attack on Minorca had opened the war between Great Britain and 
France. But Frederick at Berlin was fully aware that his own turn was 
coming, nor was it his intention to wait until the net had closed round him. 
He was satisfied that Saxony, which lay in on his southern border, was 
involved in the combination against him. It was of first-rate importance 
to him that he should strike before his enemies were ready, and force them 
to adopt a plan of operations imposed on them by his action, instead of 
leaving them the initiative and of being himself forced to adapt his own 
action to their operations. But he could not strike at Austria with Saxony 
ready to attack his own flank. Frederick never hesitated for his own part 
to subordinate the niceties of international law to the necessities of the 
hour. A couple of months after Port Mahon had surrendered to the 
French the King of Prussia marched into Saxony. If he could paralyse 
the Electorate, or, still better, if he could induce it to support him, he 



EMPIRE 619 

designed an immediate invasion of Bohemia and possibly a blow at Prague 
before the winter set in. 

The plan was foiled, because the Saxons offered an unexpected resist- 
ance. Their forces concentrated in an impregnable position at Pirna, 
covering Dresden. Frederick had no alternative but to commence a 
blockade. An unsuccessful attempt to relieve the Saxons was made by the 
Austrian Marshal Browne — Scottish and Irish family names are notable 
among the commanders of continental armies at this period. The Saxons 




Map of the Prussian Area of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763. 

were starved into a surrender, Frederick entered Dresden, the Dresden 
Archives fell into his Hands, and he was able to publish the evidence which 
justified his action. Saxon troops were obliged to serve in the armies of 
the king of Prussia, and Saxon money helped to supply the Prussian 
treasury. But the resistance of Pirna had delayed operations too long for 
Frederick to surprise Bohemia by a sudden blow. 

Winter and spring were occupied in preparations and negotiations in 
which the diplomatic skill of Kaunitz was triumphant. The Treaty of 
Versailles, signed on May 1, 1757, established the terms of an alliance 
between Austria, Russia, and France, in which nearly all the advantages 



620 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

were to go to Austria. Prussia itself was to be partitioned between Austria, 
Russia, Poland, and Saxony, the Saxon Elector being also king of Poland ; 
in the event only of complete success France was to have her own reward 
in the Netherlands. On the other hand Hanover, after a vain attempt to 
get her own territory guaranteed in return for neutrality, was obliged to 
take part with Prussia and to undertake the defence of the line of the 
Weser against the anticipated invasion by the French. The command 
of this force was entrusted to the Duke of Cumberland. 

The allies apparently reckoned that Frederick, against so vast a com- 
bination, would adopt a purely defensive attitude and confine himself to 
preparations for resisting attack. But for Frederick at least the true 
defensive strategy lay in a vigorous offensive. He was overwhelmingly out- 
numbered ; his one chance lay in striking crushing blows which should 
keep the circle of his enemies perpetually broken ; and for carrying out 
this programme he had the strategical advantage of holding the interior 
lines. That is, being himself at the centre of a semicircle, he could fling 
the mass of his troops from one point to another on the circumference 
much more swiftly than could his foes. But taking the offensive involved 
enormous risks, and demanded a supreme audacity which lay outside the 
calculations of strategists who practised warfare on orthodox lines. 

The Austrians were startled when suddenly at the beginning of May 
Frederick flung himself upon Bohemia and shattered their main force before 
Prague, before a second army could come up to its support and overwhelm 
him. But when he attempted to repeat the blow against the second 
Austrian army he met with a crushing defeat at Kolin ; he was forced to 
fall back into Saxony, leaving a column under Bevern to hold the Austrians 
in check, when they should have recovered from their exertions sufficiently 
to advance in force. And meanwhile the great French army was advan- 
cing to measure swords with Cumberland on the Weser. 

This was the position of affairs when the ministerial coalition, headed by 
Pitt and Newcastle, was formed in England at the end of June. It was not 
yet known in England that events of vast importance had been taking place 
in India, and that even at that moment Robert Clive was master of Bengal. 
It was indeed only quite recently that the public had learnt of the tragedy 
of the Black Hole of Calcutta in the previous July, for Indian news might 
take any time from six months to a year to travel. The whole situation 
looked appallingly black. 

Nor were there immediate signs that it would lighten. The Weser was 
not in fact a defensible river. The great French army got across it 
unopposed, and proceeded to attack Cumberland at Hastenbeck. A battle 
was fought which was indecisive. Nevertheless Cumberland, instead of 
holding his ground, fell back to the north as far as Stade on the Elbe, 
below Hamburg. There is reason to believe that in so doing he was acting 
against his own judgment under orders from his father, and that his own 
wish was to form a junction with Frederick. Whether that be true or not, 



EMPIRE 621 

his retreat left the way to Prussia through Hanover open. But the Duke 
of Richelieu, who was now sent to take command of the French army, 
tarried to plunder the country, which he did very effectively, and then 
turned in pursuit of Cumberland, who found himself in a cul de sac and 
apparently about to be overwhelmed by a much larger army than his own. 
Negotiations were opened through the instrumentality of the king of 
Denmark, and a convention was signed at Kloster Seven on September 
10. Under the convention the non-Hanoverian troops under Cumber- 
land's command were to be sent home, while the Hanoverians themselves 
were to be permitted to remain in winter quarters in the neighbourhood 
of Stade. In deference to Cumberland's urgency, Richelieu consented to 
waive the term ts capitulation," which implies the act of a commander in the 
field completely binding in itself, and to call the agreement a " convention," 
an act which requires ratification by a government. 

It did not apparently occur either to Richelieu or to Cumberland that 
the convention might not be ratified ; it was taken as a preliminary to the 
neutralising of Hanover. Nevertheless the convention was not ratified. 
Richelieu moved off to occupy the south-western corner of Prussia with a 
portion of his troops, while the rest were despatched to join the second 
French army under Soubise, which was on the point of invading Saxony. 
In England the news of the convention was received with a storm of 
indignation ; its ratification was refused ; Cumberland was recalled in dis- 
grace, and refused to defend himself, though he believed himself to have 
been acting under King George's own orders. At the instance of Pitt 
Frederick was invited to appoint the Duke of Brunswick's brother, Prince 
Ferdinand, to the command of the forces in Hanover, while all idea of 
neutralising George's Electorate was abandoned. 

The tale of misfortune was not yet complete. The first fruit of Pitt's 
accession to power in England was an expedition against Rochefort, on 
the west coast of France not far from Rochelleo But the General Mor- 
daunt and the Admiral Hawke disagreed, and the expedition returned at 
the beginning of October, having accomplished practically nothing. The 
only good news so far was that in India Clive had captured the French fac- 
tory at Chandernagur in March, for the conquest of Bengal was still un- 
dreamed of. American affairs still went ill. The French under Montcalm 
had long before cleared the line of forts connecting Lake Ontario and the 
St. Lawrence with the Ohio valley ; now they captured Fort William 
Henry on the south of Lake George. The British commander, Lord 
Loudoun, relinquished the plan of attempting to capture Louisbourg ; and 
Admiral Holburne, attempting to strike at the French fleet, failed to bring 
it to action, while his own force suffered so severely in a hurricane that it 
had to return home. 

But although defeat and failure still through the closing months of 
1757 seemed to be the order of the day for the British arms, November 
and December saw two of Frederick's most brilliant triumphs. In October 



622 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

the great French army under Soubise was preparing to deliver Saxony 
from its captor. It was always one of Frederick's supreme difficulties that 
he was precluded from playing a waiting game. It was of the utmost im- 
portance to him now to bring Soubise to an engagement and clear him 
off the field, so that he himself might get back to fight the Austrians. 
Soubise saw no reason to fight in order to please Frederick, and Frederick 
could not make a direct attack on him ; but a raiding force of Austrians, 
directed upon Berlin, drew Frederick with his army to the protection of 
the capital. The Austrians retreated again ; but Soubise had been tempted 
forward by Frederick's withdrawal, and before he could in turn draw back 
again Frederick forced him to a decisive engagement at Rossbach. Soubise, 
with an immensely larger force, attempted an enveloping movement ; the 
Prussians fell upon the extended line, broke it, and crumpled it up. 

Meanwhile the Austrian main army had entered Silesia in force and 
was threatening to reduce it. It was fully time for Frederick to hasten 
back if the whole province was not to be lost. Exactly one month after 
he had overthrown the French at Rossbach he was facing the Austrians at 
Leuthen with his victorious army. Even in the interval Bevern had been 
defeated and taken prisoner, and the very important fortress of Schweidnitz 
had fallen to the Austrians. At Leuthen, perhaps the most brilliant of 
all Frederick's brilliant victories, the great Austrian army was shattered as 
thoroughly as the army of Soubise. By the end of the year Schweidnitz 
alone was held in Silesia by Frederick's enemies, and Schweidnitz fell in 
the following spring. 



Ill 

PITT 

The central object of Pitt's policy was the conquest of America from 
the French, together with the assertion of an overwhelming naval supremacy. 
But he was fully aware that the preservation of Prussia was bound up 
with that policy. America might be conquered, but, if Frederick were 
crushed by the alliance of Bourbon and Hapsburg, the conquest of America 
might go for nothing, when that alliance should be directed to crushing an 
isolated Great Britain. America was to be won in Germany as well as on 
the high seas and the American continent. But the method was not to be 
that of Marlborough and William III. We were not to place armies at 
Frederick's disposal ; our own troops were wanted in America, which 
would draw quite as much fighting energy as could be spared from the 
development and extension of naval expeditions. Frederick in Europe was 
to be supported not with British soldiers but with British gold, gold which 
would maintain Hanoverians, Brunswickers, and other troops under the 
command of Prince Ferdinand, and would help to preserve Frederick's 



EMPIRE 623 

own treasury from depletion. It was not without some reluctance that 
Pitt found himself obliged to strengthen the army in Hanover with some 
British regiments, when Ferdinand had justified his selection by a victory 
at Crefeld. 

But this was not sufficient. From the Rochefort expedition onwards 
Pitt planned a series of descents upon the French coast and the French 
ports. They were in appearance singularly unproductive and even aimless ; 
and they have often been condemned by critical historians. In that 
condemnation Frederick the Great did not concur. They were a very 
material contribution to the defence of Prussia. Immense numbers of 
French troops were kept out of action, out of the French armies which 
took the field against Prussia, locked up in France because they had to be 
in perpetual readiness to meet a British attack, at whatever point of the 
coast it might be delivered. Naval or military experts may differ on the 
question whether the policy was right or wrong, while the lay student is 
apt to judge it by the absence of any obvious resultant gain. But it was 
at any rate a policy approved and commended both in its intentions and in 
its effects by the greatest military authority of the time, in whose interest it 
was carried out. It must be regarded as having been in part at least the 
effective employment of naval supremacy to co-operate with the military 
forces bvs a constant diversion of the enemy's troops from their true 
military objective. 

In 1757 Great Britain had achieved no successes ; Frederick's victory at 
Prague had been more than counteracted by his crushing defeat at Kolin, 
and he had redeemed his position only by the two extraordinarily brilliant 
performances at Rossbach and Leuthen. But for the inactivity of the 
Russian armies beyond his eastern frontier — due to an idea that the Tsarina 
was dying and would be succeeded by a Tsar whose sympathies were 
entirely with Frederick — Prussia might even have been crushed in that 
year. In 1758 Frederick was able to open a campaign in Moravia, but in 
August he found himself obliged to strike at an advancing force of Russians. 
The hardly won victory of Zorndorf drove them back into Poland ; but it 
was already more than time for Frederick to dash back to Saxony, and 
then he was actually deieated by the Austrian commander Daun. But 
Daun rested on his laurels, and again Frederick had to race off to Silesia 
to give check to another Austrian army and return in time to prevent the 
dilatory Daun from taking advantage of his temporary absence. Mean- 
while Ferdinand of Brunswick had gradually forced the French in the 
North back across the Rhine and put them to rout at Crefeld. But he 
was still threatened by a second French army which Soubise had re-formed ; 
and the French prospects were very much improved by the accession to 
power of the vigorous minister Choiseul, who began to infuse a new life and 
energy into the war. 

Frederick, then, during the year rather more than held his own ; but the 
campaigns illustrate the enormous difficulties of his position. He could 



6 24 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

never adopt the tactics of defence, the methods of William of Orange, who 
never won great victories but always made sure that defeat should not 
mean disaster. The king of Prussia was always under the necessity of 
attempting to shatter the particular enemy whom he was for the moment 
facing. He had no time to follow up a success in one quarter or even to 
retrieve a defeat ; because, the moment he had struck, he had to hurry at 
full speed to another quarter to parry another attack. Whenever he was 
in Silesia the French with recuperated forces were threatening Saxony ; 
whenever he was in Saxony the Austrians were recuperating themselves 
and threatening Silesia ; and when both French and Austrians had been 
temporarily beaten back, the Russians on the north-east were threatening 
Brandenburg itself. Each of the three allies was generally able to keep 
in being a couple of armies any one of which immensely outnumbered the 
largest force which Frederick could collect in any one quarter ; although, 
happily for him, Ferdinand of Brunswick consistently proved himself able 
to deal effectively with the northern French army. As we have seen, 
neither of the French armies attained what should have been its maximum 
fighting strength because of the forces which were detained elsewhere by 
fear of British descents on the coasts and ports. One such descent was 
made upon Cherbourg in August with some success ; stores and guns were 
captured and fortifications were demolished. But two attacks upon St. Malo 
in June and September were ineffectual, and the second was attended by a 
heavy list of casualties. 

But British naval predominance was being definitely reasserted ; the news 
of Clive's apparently miraculous victory at Plassey was an inspiration to deeds 
of prowess, and affairs in America took a more satisfactory turn. There 
Pitt planned a vigorous campaign. Loudoun was recalled, and the chief 
command was given to Amherst, with James Wolfe as his second in 
command. They, in co-operation with the fleet under Boscawen, were to 
capture Louisbourg, the great fort on Cape Breton commanding the estuary 
of the St. Lawrence,, and were to proceed thence to the reduction of 
Quebec. A second force under James Abercrombie, who had been 
Loudoun's senior subordinate, was to attack the French on the Upper 
St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain, seizing Ticonderoga as a preliminary 
to the advance upon Montreal. A third force was to attack Fort Duquesne, 
not so much because the fort was dangerous in itself as because it 
symbolised the previous successes of France on the continent. "Although 
Abercrombie mismanaged the attack on Ticonderoga, where his troops 
were cut up in making a frontal attack upon a very strongly entrenched 
position, both Fort Duquesne and Louisbourg were captured. Amherst, 
however, did not feel himself able to attempt the reduction of Quebec 
before the winter. 

The next year, 1759, was the British year of victories and the French 
year of disasters, while Frederick himself for the first time definitely lost 
ground, and even for a moment during the course of it lost heart. He 



EMPIRE 625 

was already becoming too exhausted to do more than watch for the point 
where he must strike at all costs. Again it was the Russian advance which 
had to be repelled. In August the Russian force was descending upon 
Frankfort on the Oder. It was joined by an Austrian contingent before 
Frederick could strike in and sever the two armies. He attacked the foe 
at Kunersdorf. The attack was successful, but Frederick attempted with 
troops already exhausted to improve his victory into the annihilation of 
the greatly superior force opposed to him ; the tables were turned upon 
him, and his own force barely escaped annihilation. 

He was saved from total destruction because neither Russians nor 
Austrians made any more use of their victory, and because only a few days 
earlier Ferdinand of Brunswick inflicted a decisive defeat on the French 
at Minden. The French were rolled back with very heavy loss. The 
disaster to them would have been even more overwhelming, but for the 
entirely unaccountable refusal of Lord George Sackville to employ his 
cavalry in accordarce with repeated orders from Prince Ferdinand, 
conduct which ultimately led to his dismissal from the service. But the 
victory was admittedly won by the skilful dispositions of Ferdinand and 
the altogether admirable conduct of the British troops which bore the 
brunt of the fighting. Particular distinction was won by the Marquis of 
Granby, who commanded the second British line. His popularity in 
England, s it may be observed in passing, is attested by the number of inns 
which adopted the gallant warrior's head as a sign. In spite of Lord 
George Sackville, the battle of Minden redounded to the honour of British 
arms. 

But other glories of the year were exclusively British. Choiseul con- 
centrated his designs on a plan for the invasion of England ; nevertheless, 
so vigorously had the navy been developed that Pitt was able to despatch 
expeditions to the West Indies, where Guadeloupe was captured, and to 
the St. Lawrence, to co-operate in the plan of campaign against Canada, 
without fear that the remainder of the fleet would be insufficient to repel 
invasion, though another squadron was conveying reinforcements to India. 
Admiral Rodney bombarded Havre, where a flotilla awaited the embarkation 
of French troops, though with no very great results. 

The two great French naval armaments lay at Toulon and at Brest, 
while Boscawen kept watch within the Mediterranean, and Hawke's fleet 
was on guard in Tor Bay. In August La Clue slipped out of Toulon, to 
join Conflans at Brest, with ten ships of the line and two ships of fifty guns. 
Boscawen caught them off Lagos Bay on the south of Portugal, and 
destroyed five of them, while five were blockaded in the harbour of Cadiz. 

Hawke's blockade of Brest kept the main French fleet there completely 
shut up until contrary winds forced the British to shelter in Tor Bay. 
Conflans started from Brest, intending to pick up and convoy an invading 
force to Scotland. But Hawke too was released from Tor Bay by the change 
of wind. Conflans, with twenty-one sail of the line, was in pursuit of a small 

2 R 



626 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 



squadron of British ships which were cruising in the neighbourhood, when 
Hawke's fleet hove in sight. A north-westerly wind was rising to a gale, 
and Conflans ran for Quiberon Bay in the hope that the pursuing British, 
who had twenty-three ships of the line, would find themselves pounded 
among the shoals and rocks. Though the gale was developing into a 
storm, Hawke was not to be baffled. His van overtook the French rear 
and won a victory not less crushing than that of La Hogue. Five of the 
French were sunk. Seven, lightened by throwing guns and stores over- 
board, got over the shallow entrance of the Vilaine, though four of them 
were completely disabled. Nine escaped to Rochefort or to the Loire ; 
none had the chance of coming out again. The French line of battleships 
were hopelessly scattered in threes and fours in different ports, where it 

was an easy matter to keep them blockaded. 
The English lost in the fight or in connection 
with the fight only a couple of ships, which ran 
upon rocks. The year had added to the 
British Navy twenty-seven French ships of the 
line and thirty French frigates. From that 
time till the end of the war the bulk of the 
British fleet was available for despatch to any 
part of the world where it might be wanted ; 
the balance was quite sufficient to prevent any 
French squadron from taking the sea. The 
dream of a French invasion was finally dis- 
posed of. 

The battle of Quiberon Bay was fought 
on November 20th, two months after the still 
more celebrated but not more decisive triumph of the British arms in 
Canada. Not more decisive, because if Wolfe had been beaten on the 
Heights of Abraham Hawke's destruction of the French fleet would 
still have enabled the British to pour reinforcements into Canada un- 
checked, and the French would still have been almost certainly over- 
whelmed. 

Again Pitt's plan of campaign meant an advance in three columns — 
one directed in the farthest west upon Niagara, the second with the main 
body under Amherst upon Ticonderoga, while the third, of which Wolfe 
now held the command, was to proceed up the St. Lawrence against 
Quebec supported by the squadron under Admiral Sanders. Quebec had 
received its last small reinforcement from France in May, before the 
blockade of the French coast was completed. It was intended that the 
two western forces should converge upon Quebec to join hands with 
Wolfe ; but though they were able to capture Niagara and Ticonderoga, 
each found difficulties in the way which prevented its further advance. 

At the end of June Wolfe, with the Admirals Sanders and Holmes, 
arrived before Quebec. Quebec stands on the St. Lawrence, on a height 




General James Wolfe. 



EMPIRE 627 

which was accounted impregnable on the western side. On the east the 
river St. Charles, flowing into the St. Lawrence, was secured at its entrance 
by a boom ; and the greater part of the French army, which outnumbered 
the British forces, lay entrenched between the St. Charles and the Mont- 
morenci river to the east. Wolfe occupied the southern bank and the 
north bank east of the Montmorenci. Admiral Holmes, carrying twelve 
hundred British troops, moved up the river above Quebec, and so gave 
employment to a French corps of observation. Sanders made any relief 
of the French from the eastward impossible. 

A complete investment of Quebec was out of the question until Amherst 
should arrive ; but there was no sign of Amherst arriving, and if it held 
out till the winter 
the St. Lawrence 
would no longer be 
navigable, and the 
ships would have to 
retire. It was Mont- 
calm's business to 
stand on the defen- 
sive; Wolfe could 
not force his lines, 
and the Frenchman 
was not to be 
tempted out of his 
entrenchments. An 
attack on the French 
camp failed, Wolfe 
himself became seriously ill, and at the beginning of September his de- 
spatches to England were full of the gloomiest forebodings. Two days 
after the arrival of the most depressing of these letters came an over- 
whelming revulsion. Quebec had fallen, and Wolfe too had fallen in the 
hour of victory. He had conceived the desperate design of scaling the 
Heights of Abraham on the western side of Quebec. Success was possible, 
if at all, only by effecting a complete surprise ; defeat would mean disaster ; 
but Wolfe resolved to take the risk. On December 12th Holmes moved 
up the river, threatening an attack from a higher point and drawing off the 
French detachment of Bougainville, whose task it was to prevent a landing 
on that side. A heavy bombardment of the French camp on the east was 
opened by Admiral Sanders as the prelude to a grand attack in that quarter. 
Both movements were feints, intended to withdraw the attention of the 
French from the real point of attack. Wolfe, in the night, with four thousand 
men in boats, dropped down the river to the point chosen ; he had shifted 
camp to facilitate embarkation above Quebec. No sentries were on guard 
at the foot of the precipitous height which the force scaled undetected ; the 
leaders surprised and caught the small guard at the top. By daybreak 




Plan of the Capture of Quebec, 1759. 



628 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

something over three thousand men were beginning to be formed in order 
of battle. Montcalm's forces were rapidly brought up ; how much they 
outnumbered the British is not known. At about nine o'clock the French 
swept forward to drive the English over the cliff ; the British reserved their 
fire till the enemy were thirty yards off. At the first deadly volley the 
French checked and reeled ; at the second they broke and fled, while the 
British charged with the bayonet, and were stopped only by the fire of the 
artillery from the town walls. Montcalm had received his death wound ; 
but Wolfe himself "died happy" on the field. The victorious British en- 
trenched themselves in the position they had won, and four days later 
Quebec capitulated. 

During 1760 the main feature of the war was the completion of the 
conquest of Canada, together with the final blow dealt to the collapsing 
French power in India at the battle of Wandewash. Frederick through- 
out the year was in great straits. Prussia was almost drained of fighting 
material ; all Prince Ferdinand's skill and all his men were required to 
hold back the still very much larger force which the French were able to 
put in the field. Already at the close of 1759 the coalition had made good 
their footing in Saxony, and were in possession of Dresden. But for the 
British subsidies it would have been impossible to maintain in the field 
armies which could now only be scraped together with the utmost difficulty. 
Frederick could indeed hardly have been saved but for the incomparable 
sluggishness of the Austrian Daun and the stolid immobility of the Russians. 
Thus aided he was enabled in the autumn to defeat Laudon at Liegnitz, 
and then Daun himself at Torgau, while the Russians did nothing. But 
Frederick's victories were no longer shattering blows ; they were reverses 
for his enemies, not disasters ; and before the year was over his prospects 
were seriously affected by the death of George II., and the accession to the 
British throne of a young king who was determined to rid himself of Pitt's 
ascendency. 

To Pitt's loyalty Frederick owed it that he was not left to his fate. 
For during the first month of the year Choiseul was doing his best to 
induce Pitt to enter on a separate negotiation. But in the first place 
nothing would induce Pitt to desert his ally ; and in the second he was fully 
satisfied that in spite of his own enormous war expenditure, the strain on 
France was much more severe, that she was becoming thoroughly exhausted, 
and that the longer the war went on the more completely she would be 
prostrated. He was undeterred by the suspicion already awakening in his 
mind that Spain under a new king might join the coalition. For the 
pacific Ferdinand was dead and had been succeeded by his half-brother, 
Charles IV., who had resigned the throne of Naples to occupy that of Spain. 
Choiseul's negotiations with Britain were therefore fruitless. 

Those negotiations, though they led to a temporary suspension of 
hostilities in the western theatre of the war in Europe, did not check the 
progress of events in Canada. The British now held Quebec, under 




W £ 

M z 

H .5 

o ■§ 

5 "a 

H d 

W o 

H w 



EMPIRE 629 

command of General Murray, as well as Louisbourg. Amherst was again 
setting forward his converging movement on the west. The French sought 
to strike the first blow by attacking Quebec, where the garrison could not 
obtain the support of a British squadron until the St. Lawrence became 
navigable again. For this purpose they were able to despatch a force which 
was double that under Murray's command ; and at the end of April the 
British, after a sharp encounter at Sainte Foy, were driven within the walls 
of Quebec. But ten days later came the news that a British squadron was 
now making its way up the St. Lawrence, and the French retreated. All 
that was left for them was the attempt to maintain themselves at Montreal ; 
but Murray was free to take his own share in the converging movement, 
advancing from Quebec. The three British columns united before 
Montreal on September 7th, and the next day the town capitulated. The 
whole Canadian dominion was surrendered to the British Crown under a 
guarantee that property was not to be disturbed and that religious liberty 
was to be secured, while the French troops with their officers laid down 
their arms and were sent back to France under promise of not again serv- 
ing during the war. 

The crisis of the struggle was over. In America and India the French 
had been beaten out of the field as rivals of the British, and the supremacy 
of the British race was assured. More than two years were to pass before 
peace was signed, a peace which in effect confirmed, as far as the British 
Empire was concerned, the position which had already been won when the 
old king died in October 1760. The reign of Pitt practically ended with 
the reign of George II. The control was taken from his hands, and the 
last phase of the war forms the first phase of new political and international 
conditions. It remains in this chapter to complete the story of the 
establishment of the British power in the East. 



IV 

BENGAL 

In 1754 the two leading actors in the Anglo-French struggle in India 
were withdrawn from the scene — Dupleix to suffer from shameful ill- 
treatment at the hands of his countrymen, the victor of Arcot to seek 
parliamentary honours, which, happily, he failed to obtain. The strife had 
been restricted to the Carnatic ; and the British and French governors in 
that province came to an amicable agreement that they would leave native 
politics alone and fight no more. Still it was anticipated that when France 
and Britain went to war again there would be some difficulty in preserving 
the peace in India. In 1756 Clive was returning to the East, and there was 
a small British squadron in Indian waters under the command of Admiral 
Watson. In conjunction with the admiral, Clive destroyed a pirate's 



630 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

stronghold at Gheriah on the west coast and then proceeded to take up his 
command at Fort St. David. No active steps against the French were 
possible under the existing agreement, and it must be noted that the declara- 
tion of war between England and France was not known in India until 
early in 1757. 

But in August there came to Madras the news of a ghastly tragedy at 
Calcutta. 

The events in the Carnatic had attracted little attention in Hindustan. 
The Mogul reigned at Delhi, but in effect the whole north-west was 
dominated by Ahmed Shah, the master of Kabul. From 
Central India the Western Marathas had pushed their 
power up to the banks of the Jumna, the river on which 
stand the Mogul cities of Delhi and Agra. The whole 
Maratha confederacy recognised as its head the hereditary 
Peishwa, a sort of mayor of the palace, who was nominally 
the minister of the royal house of the Marathas. The 
peishwa's headquarters were at Puna. The chief of the 
Eastern Marathas was the Bhonsla, the Rajah of Berar 
or Nagpur, which is as nearly as possible the central point 
of the Peninsula ; and the eastern Marathas raided the 
Ganges provinces as far down the river as Calcutta itself. 
Between Ahmed Shah on the north-west and the Marathas 
on the south the Mogul was practically without power at 
all, and the two nawabs of the great Ganges provinces, of 
which the upper was Oudh and the lower Bengal with 
Behar, had made themselves independent princes. The 
Nawab of Oudh, however, claimed the title of Wazir or 
Chief Minister of the Mogul. 

Now at the beginning of 1756 Ali Vardi Khan, the old 
experienced Nawab of Bengal, died, and was succeeded by his grandson 
Suraj ud-Daulah, a half mad youth of nineteen, full of an inordinate vanity 
and a lust for blood, very much like the Roman Emperor Caligula. Suraj 
ud-Daulah, possibly at the instigation of the French, chose to take offence 
because the British at Fort William were strengthening their fortifications 
in case they should find themselves involved in hostilities with their French 
neighbours at Chandernagur. The nawab ordered them to demolish their 
fortifications, the governor replied with a remonstrance; and the nawab 
responded by despatching an army to Calcutta. The governor and some 
others fled on some British ships which were in the Hugh; those who 
remained behind had no choice but to surrender. The unhappy prisoners, 
one hundred and forty-six in number, were packed into a chamber twenty 
feet square, three human beings to the square yard, with one small grating 
to let in air, on a sultry July night in Calcutta. Then Suraj ud-Daulah 
forgot them till next morning, when twenty-three of the hundred and forty 
six were found to be still alive. Such was the tragedy of the Black Hole. 




Suraj ud-Daulah, 
Nawab of Bengal. 

[From a painting of the 

Nawab and his sons, 

by Kettle.] 



EMPIRE 631 

One course only was possible for the British in Madras. At whatever 
cost the perpetrator of so ghastly an outrage must be punished. Clive, 
with the company's forces and Watson's naval squadron of ten ships, were 
despatched to the Hugh. In the first week of January Clive had stormed 
and captured the forts of Baj-Baj and Hugh, and had driven the nawab's 
troops out of Calcutta. The nawab, who was beginning to discover that 
traders were more use to him alive than dead, was surprised to find that the 
British could fight as well as trade. He had collected an army to wipe 
them out, but that army in turn was scattered ; he began to treat. 

But while he was making promises to Clive of restitution and compen- 
sation, he was secretly imploring the French at Chandernagur, and even 
Bussy at Haidarabad, to come to his aid. The way was cleared for Clive 
by news of the declaration of war between France and Great Britain. He 
gave no time for a combination to be formed against the British, but at 
once struck at Chandernagur, which fell on March 23rd. All the military 
stores and five hundred prisoners of war fell into his hands. That settled 
the question of French intervention in Bengal, and decided Bussy to 
confine his activities to the south. The question now was whether Clive 
had done enough for British honour and should return to the south, where 
the Carnatic was threatened with a French war. If he did so, Calcutta 
would be left defenceless, and there was every probability that Suraj ud- 
Daulah, free from the immediate terror inspired by the presence of the 
British forces, was sufficiently insane to seek revenge. 

The call to remain in Bengal came from the natives themselves. The 
nawab's rule was a reign of terror ; his principal ministers resolved to get 
rid of him, and to set on the throne Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of 
his army. They applied to Clive to assist them. Mir Jafar as nawab of 
Bengal, established there by aid of the British, would be a puppet of the 
British as completely as the nawab of Arcot. Clive and the Calcutta 
Council entertained the proposal. While they amused Suraj ud-Daulah with 
empty negotiations, terms were arranged with the conspirators through 
their Hindu agent, Amin Chand. In the course of the negotiations with the 
conspirators Clive, with the support of the Council, committed the one act 
of his public career which is seriously open to censure. When all was 
ready except the formal completion of the agreements, Amin Chand (or 
Omichund, as Macaulay calls him) demanded the insertion in the treaty of 
a clause engaging to pay him .£300,000. Every detail of the plot was known 
to him, and would be betrayed to Suraj ud-Daulah if his demand were 
refused. He was tricked by a fraud such as he might have invented him- 
self. Two copies of the treaty were drawn up, one upon red paper, con- 
taining the required promise which was omitted from the other. He was 
satisfied when he was shown the red treaty with the British signatures 
attached to it. He did not know that one of the signatures was a forgery. 
Admiral Watson had refused to append his name, though, when the thing 
was done, he became a party to it. But it was the other treaty without 



632 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

the blackmailing clause which was signed by the conspirators. Clive to 
the day of his death asserted that he was justified; but on no other 
occasion did he depart from the one sound rule for Europeans in dealing 
with Orientals, of holding fast not by the Eastern but by the Western 
standard of morals. For no Oriental would have been shocked by the 
deception practised upon Amin Chand. 

When the treaty was signed, Clive no longer considered it necessary 
to play with Suraj ud-Daulah. He sent to the nawab a despatch, setting 
forth the whole of the British grievances, and announced that he was 
coming with his men to the nawab's capital of Murshidabad to receive his 
answer. He followed his letter at the head of his troops — something over 
three thousand men, of whom two thousand were sepoys, and ten guns. 
The letter was despatched and the advance began on 13th June. The 
nawab moved to meet him with sixty thousand men at his back. On the 
fifth day the British halted at Katwa. There was no sign of Mir Jafar 
carrying out his promises, and the march was checked by stormy weather. 
On the eighth day Clive, for the first and last time of his life, held a council 
of war. An advance must mean either a victory against unparalleled odds or 
annihilation. Would it be better to take the risk, or to entrench themselves 
where they were at Katwa and invite aid from the Marathas, which might 
involve indefinite delay, and the intervention of Bussy on the other side ? 
Clive's own opinion was given in favour of the more cautious course ; 
eleven of the council of war supported him, seven voted for the advance. 
The council was broken up and Clive withdrew by himself to meditate on 
the situation. The result was that he reversed the decision of the council, 
and the advance was renewed in the morning. 

The next night the British force, wet and weary, bivouacked in the 
grove of Plassey ; and with the dawn of June 23 they were drawn up face 
to face with twenty times their own number of the nawab's troops. The 
morning passed in cannonading ; as the afternoon advanced a small body 
of fifty Frenchmen, who were with the nawab's army, were seen to move ; 
one of the British officers at once without orders occupied the spot where 
they had been posted. The nawab's guns were put out of action, Clive's 
line advanced, and the whole vast army broke before it and fled. So slight 
was the resistance offered that the vanquished lost only a few hundred men, 
the victors only seventy. Suraj ud-Daulah, fleeing in disguise from Murshi- 
dabad, was caught and murdered by the son of Mir Jafar. Clive, according 
to promise, proclaimed Mir Jafar nawab, but would allow no bloodshed. 
To the natives Clive became at once a sort of demi-god ; and he found 
himself not only effective master of Mir Jafar himself, but for all practical 
purposes responsible master of all Bengal ; while the fame of his miraculous 
powers spread over half India. It never occurred to the new nawab to 
regard himself as independent of the power which had placed him on the 
throne, and which would in no wise permit him to play the despot. It was 
manifestly impossible to pretend that effective government could be assumed 



EMPIRE 633 

by any one except Clive and the British, whose lightest word none durst 
disobey. 

Above all, it was out of the question that Clive should leave the province 
until some system had been organised for preserving the British control. 
Without any such design on their part the East India Company had become 
at a stroke a territorial power, lords of the richest province in India. In- 
structions for the formation of a government were sent out by the directors 
from London, who understood so little of the situation that Clive himself 
was not included in the commission ; perhaps it was assumed that his 
military services would be in requisition elsewhere. The British on the 
spot, however, had no doubts, and deliberately placed themselves at their 

j . ^^S^^^ aQt^^^^ai^^i^^ar^-^-^- 
^oaaAfiMe^ 23*of<Ja*ie>ij5j.fry CoC! RoMCl<ve',a^iim^i'Mey'iyi/a/>o6 ef Bengal-. 




Clive's victory at Plassey 
[From a plan published in 1760.] 



great chief's orders. A little later the directors sent revised instructions, 
which made Clive officially what he already was in actual fact. It was not 
till the end of 1760 that he felt able to retire from the scene of his triumphs 
and returned to England. 

During the two and a half years of Clive's personal rule in Bengal the 
struggle between French and British was fought to a finish in the south; 
when he left India the French were cooped up in Pondichery, and were on 
the point of surrendering their last stronghold. In the conflict with them 
Clive took no further personal part ; Bengal gave him enough to do. Six 
months after Plassey the Oudh Wazir threatened an invasion, but his 
armies melted away at the mere threat of Clive's approach. In 1758 the 
enormous prestige he had won enabled him almost to denude Bengal of 
British troops in order to despatch an expedition to seize Masulipa + am, a 



634 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

city on the east coast situated in the district called the Sarkars, just south of the 
river Godavery, an episode which belongs to the last phase of the struggle 
with the French. The departure of the troops induced the Nawab of Oudh 
to contemplate another invasion, this time in conjunction with the "Shah- 
zada," the heir to the throne of the Mogul. Clive could only collect some 
four hundred British and about six times as many sepoys. With this small 
force he covered in twenty-three days the four hundred miles which 
separate Calcutta from Patna, to which the Shahzada had laid siege. 
The siege was raised, and the hosts of the Shahzada and the Wazir scattered 
in hasty flight. 

Yet once more Clive had to display his promptitude and energy in 
emergency. The Dutch had played no important part in India, but they 
too had a factory at Chinsura, on the Hugh. Towards the end of 1759 
seven of the Dutch company's ships appeared in the river. There was no 
quarrel between Dutch and British, but in fact the Dutchmen were not 
profiting by the sudden development of the British ascendency, and they 
had given ear to the appeal of Mir Jafar, who was growing secretly restive 
in his position of subordination. Clive's suspicions were aroused, and 
became certainty when the Dutch seized some English vessels. Forde, the 
trusted officer whom Clive had sent against Masulipatam, was now back at 
Calcutta, having achieved his task. He was at once despatched against 
Chinsura, while three English ships under the command of Captain Wilson 
attacked and captured the seven Dutchmen. Mir Jafar promptly turned 
against his intended allies, who had to appeal to Clive himself for the pro- 
tection which he extended to them. And so collapsed the last extraneous 
attempts at intervention in Bengal. 

Eighteen months earlier the French had revived the contest by sending 
to the Carnatic some troops under the command of Lally, the son of an 
Irish father who had been one of the gallant defenders of Limerick. A 
brave and efficient soldier himself, he was absolutely devoid of tact in 
dealing with his own officers, his own men, or with natives. Also he was 
under positive orders to have no dealings with the native courts, whereas 
such chance as the French had lay almost entirely in the influence which 
Bussy exercised at the court of the Nizam. Now the Nizam had bestowed 
upon the French the coast district known as the Northern Sarkars, from 
which supplies ought to have been procurable. But Lally proceeded to 
summon Bussy from Haidarabad, and the troops from the Sarkars, in 
order to besiege Madras. Madras held out under Stringer Lawrence, and 
the appearance of a British squadron sent the besiegers hurrying back to 
Pondichery, to the wrath of their commander. And, meanwhile, Forde's 
expedition from Calcutta was attacking Masulipatam, which fell in April 
(1759). The Nizam, no longer under Bussy's personal control, found the 
British victory convincing, and granted the Sarkars to the British instead 
of to the French. The British successes were crowned in the following 
January, when Lally was defeated at Wandewash by Eyre Coote, one of 



EMPIRE 635 

the officers who had voted in the audacious minority in Clive's council of 
war before Plassey. By October the French were swept up into Pondi- 
chery, and Pondichery itself surrendered in January 1761. So ended the 
struggle between French and British in India with the complete loss of the 
French power, confirmed by the peace two years later ; and so was the 
British East India Company established as a territorial power in Bengal. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE THIRD GEORGE 

I 



THE- NEW RING 

George III. was twenty-two years of age when he succeeded his grand- 
father. The old king had always been on the worst of terms with Frederick 
Prince of Wales and his wife ; their residence, Leicester House, had habi- 
tually been the headquarters of 
opposition to the king's govern- 
ment ; and young George was 
brought up to hold his grand- 
father in contempt, and to set 
before himself very different 
monarchical ideals from those 
which George II. had, though 
not without reluctance, learnt 
to accept. Young George's 
mind was full of ideas of the 
"patriot king" who ruled the 
destinies of his subjects with a 
beneficent hand. Every leading 
European government — every 
government except those of 
Poland, Holland, and Switzer- 
land — was absolutist, with only 
very slight modifications ; in 
Great Britain alone the system 
of constitutionalism or limited monarchy had prevailed. Strafford and 
Charles I. had paid with their heads, and James II. had paid with his 
crown, for attempting to establish in England a monarchy on the lines 
which triumphed on the continent. There was no possibility of reviving 
the Stuart theory ; the Crown would never again be able to override 
parliament. But parliament itself was not the free expression of the 
popular will ; it was in the hands of managers, the group of great Whig 
families who, so long as they held together, could control majorities and 
dictate to the Crown. It was the young king's design to break up the 

Whig connection and to form a party of his own which should dominate 

636 




George III. in 1767. 

[Erom the painting by Allan Ramsay in the National 
Portrait Gallery.] 



THE THIRD GEORGE 637 

parliament. After a ten years' struggle his efforts were crowned with 
success. He formed a party which commanded a safe parliamentary 
majority and took its orders from the king. 

There was another enemy to the existing government by the Whig 
connection. Pitt, who refused to be bound by party shackles, hated the 
system as heartily as George. But merely to substitute the ascendency 
in parliament of a court party for the ascendency of the Whig families, 
which was practically the aim of George III., would have been no 
improvement in the eyes of the great minister. The ultimate solution 
was to be found in a reform of the representation which should make 
parliament responsible neither to an oligarchy nor to the Crown, but to 
a free electorate; but this solution still lay in the remote future. In the 
meantime the king was no more disposed to submit to Pitt's ascendency, 
won by the sheer force of his personality, than to the ascendency of the 
Whig connection. The success of the Crown was to be achieved by setting 
the Whigs at odds with each other and with Pitt, and by rallying to the 
support of the Crown the forces which had been kept in abeyance by the 
fear of Jacobitism, and the sentiment of loyalty to the king's person which 
had been concentrated upon the " king over the water " during the last 
two reigns. That sentiment could be attracted to the new king, who was 
born and bred in England under the influence of English and Scottish 
preceptors, and could declare that he "gloried in the name of Britain" 
(not " Briton," as is commonly stated). George I. had been an uncompro- 
mising German who could not even converse in English ; George II. was 
thirty before he had set foot in England; George III. was the fellow- 
countryman of his subjects. Moreover, now there was scarcely a flicker of 
Jacobitism to divert the sentiment of loyalty from a British king. James, 
now past seventy, had alienated the once ready devotion of his followers, 
and the promise of the youth of Charles Edward Stuart had already been 
drowned in debauchery and despair. 



II 

BUTE 

After George's mother the most intimate personal influence over the 
young king was exercised by the Earl of Bute, a gentleman of some 
accomplishments, eminently respectable, and without any qualifications for 
statesmanship. George intended to get rid of Newcastle, the manipulator 
of offices, and of Pitt, who could command but would not serve. Bute 
was to be the minister who would carry out his policy ; but nothing could be 
done while the ministry was united. There were openings for dissension, 
because Pitt despised Newcastle, and Newcastle was both afraid and jealous 
of Pitt. The " Great Commoner " had carried the nation through a crisis to 



638 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

triumph ; British victories had become a matter of course ; but the war 
expenditure had been enormous, and the rewards of the struggle already 
secured appeared to be sufficient. A peace party was growing up among 
the ministers. 

At the first, however, the new influences were brought to bear not for 
the displacement of Pitt, but to encourage and develop his antagonism to 
the Whig control. Although the king expressed himself strongly as to the 
war and his desire for peace, no attempt was made to check the vigour 
of the operations. In the early summer a British expedition captured and 
occupied Belle He, an island off the French coast which was of no 
particular importance in itself, but an extremely useful asset for purposes 
of negotiation, being actually French soil. British troops, led by Granby, 
again achieved brilliant distinction under Prince Ferdinand at the battle of 
Wellinghausen. In the West Indies the island of Dominica was taken 
from the French, and from India came the news of the fall of Pondi- 
chery. 

Meanwhile, however, negotiations were passing with France, though 
with very definite assertions from Pitt that Great Britain would not desert 
the king of Prussia. Moreover, he was extremely suspicious of the sincerity 
of the French proposals, believing with justice that France was in fact 
working not for immediate peace but to bring Spain into the field. On the 
one side Pitt's demands stiffened, while on the other France began to make 
demands on behalf of Spain, and Spain on behalf of France ; and before 
the end of the summer Pitt had information of the existence of a new 
Family Compact, though the details were as yet unknown. Newcastle > 
however, had already brought Bute into office as a Secretary of State. 
Pitt came to the conclusion that although there was no real casus belli, war 
must be declared at once against Spain. He failed to carry the rest of the 
ministers with him in that view, whereupon in October he and his brother- 
in-law, Lord Temple, resigned, since he declined to retain office if the 
direction of affairs were taken out of his hands. 

Spain had denied the imputation that she was acting in concert with 
France ; she had in fact been anxious to avoid a breach before the arrival 
of the annual Plate Fleet. When the fleet came in the mask was dropped 
and the new Family Compact was published ; Pitt's attitude was justified, 
but he was already out of office. At the beginning of 1762 Bute, as the 
king's representative, dominated the ministry, and a few months later was 
able to force the resignation of Newcastle, who found his favourite business 
of exercising patronage entirely taken out of his hands. 

During the past year it had seemed that Frederick's stubborn resistance 
must be gradually worn down. The Russians were in Pomerania, and the 
Austrians were slowly gaining ground in Silesia. It was fortunate for him 
that three months after his best supporter, Pitt, had lost the direction of 
affairs in England, the pressure from Russia was suddenly withdrawn by 
the death of Elizabeth and the accession to the Russian throne of a Tsar 



THE THIRD GEORGE 639 

who idealised him as much as the Tsarina had hated him. For Bute had 
no perception of the national obligations of honour to the indomitable 
ally who had held Europe at bay while Britain destroyed her rival's power 
in America and in India. 

But when the Family Compact was published, even Bute could not 



evade war with Spain, 
and even Pitt's retirement 
could not check the tide 
of British victories. In 
fact Spain had merely de- 
livered herself as a prey 
to the power whom the 
Bourbons called the 
Tyrantof the Seas. Britain 
could strike where she 
would and when she 
would. The Bourbons 
tried to compel Portugal 
to join them; Portugal re- 
fused, and British troops 
were despatched to aid 
her in successfully defying 
Spanish coercion. A 
British fleet was engaged 
in appropriating one after 
another the French islands 
in the West Indies ; one 
expedition deprived Spain 
of Havanna, and another 
in the East Indies, directed 
against the Philippine 
Islands, captured Manilla. 
Bute refused to renew 



THE BOO T &f TH E JBrLOCK-WLAB 



WMitiLir. 




A satire of 1762 on Bute and his Administration. 

[From an etching by the Marquis Tovvnshend, who, in 1767, became 
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.] 



the subsidies to Prussia, but Frederick was more than compensated by 
the change in the attitude of Russia. 

If Pitt had been in power he would have dictated what terms he chose 
to France and Spain, and Austria would have been placed on the defensive. 
But Bute was too zealous for peace to dictate terms, and the Bourbons 
got from him a bargain very much better than was at all pleasing to the 
British nation. Preliminaries of peace, signed in November, were ratified 
by the Peace of Paris in February 1763. Frederick, deserted by his ally, 
was still enabled by the recent progress of his arms to make for himself a 
satisfactory treaty at Hubertsburg, though he never forgave what he and 
others regarded as the treachery of the British Government. Bute had 
achieved the isolation of Great Britain by deliberately throwing away 



640 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Prussia's goodwill. And for Great Britain herself, he threw away practi- 
cally the whole of the fruits of the last twelve months of the war. Had his 
course been dictated by magnanimity, by a belief that policy and chivalry 
combined to forbid the victor making too merciless a use of his triumph, 
he would have been justified; but the attempts of the Government to 
portray the Treaty of Paris as a diplomatic triumph merely stamped it as a 
diplomatic defeat. Great Britain could have well afforded to be magnani- 
mous, but magnanimity played no part in the concessions made by Bute's 
Government. 

The general principle of the treaty was the retention or exchange of 
conquests made during the war ; but by a somewhat remarkable concession 
conquests which had been made, but of which no official information had 
arrived at the moment when the treaty was signed, were surrendered. 
Consequently the capture of Manilla went for nothing. France had made 
a single conquest, that of Minorca at the opening of the war ; this was 
exchanged for Belle He. Minorca was extremely useful, while Belle He 
was very little use to Great Britain ; but French amour propre was so deeply 
concerned in its recovery that the exchange could not be regarded as 
unequal. Spain, which had intervened without provocation in the last 
stage of the quarrel, escaped almost scot-free ; since Britain accepted 
Florida in place of the infinitely more valuable Havanna, and France 
compensated Spain for this minor loss by ceding to her Louisiana, which 
remained in her hands till the end of the century, when it was retroceded 
to France, and was sold three years afterwards to the United States by 
Napoleon. For no very sufficient reason, Guadeloupe and Martinique in 
the West Indies and Goree on the African coast were given back to France. 
This completes the tale of the mere surrenders, for Bute himself could 
hardly give back what had actually been won before Pitt's retirement, though 
he gave way on points of detail where Pitt would undoubtedly have held 
firm, such as leaving to the French the fishing rights off Newfoundland 
which they had retained under the Treaty of Utrecht — ill-defined rights 
which were to be a source of complications down to the close of the 
nineteenth century. 

But the acquisitions confirmed by the treaty were sufficient. All the 
French claims on the American continent were withdrawn ; there was no 
check on the British expansion westward to the Pacific. The whole of 
Canada was ceded, and the French population, otherwise practically un- 
disturbed, passed under the sovereignty of Great Britain instead of the 
sovereignty of France. In India the French factories were restored, but 
as factories and nothing more. No French troops were to be admitted 
beyond the very small number required for what were in effect police 
purposes, nor were the French to be permitted to enter into relations with 
the native courts. Political power in the peninsula, so far as the European 
states were concerned, was entirely restricted to the British. In the East 
and in the West a British Empire was established at the Peace of Paris, 



THE THIRD GEORGE 641 

not side by side with a French Empire, but to the total exclusion of all 
European rivals. 

By the simultaneous Peace of Hubertsburg, Britain's deserted ally, 
Frederick, secured to Prussia all that she had held before his invasion of 
Saxony in 1756. 



Ill 
GEORGE GRENVILLE 

The Peace of Paris was very unpopular, and Bute's personal unpopu- 
larity was still greater, partly because he was a Scot, partly because he was 
looked upon as a "favourite," partly because he had ousted Pitt, and partly 
because his statesmanship was regarded as pusillanimous. A couple of 
months after the Peace of Paris he resigned, although for some time to 
come the public at large continued to believe that he was the real director 
of the government. The king had got rid of Pitt and of Newcastle, but 
he had not got rid of the domination of that strong section of the Whigs, 
which disliked equally the personal ascendency of Pitt and Newcastle's 
monopoly of patronage. George found himself compelled to submit to 
the tyranny of this group, headed by George Grenville and the Duke of 
Bedford, because the only alternative was to recall Pitt himself, and Pitt 
would only return upon impossible terms. Moreover, except in the desire 
to break up the Whig connection, the king's political views were diametri- 
cally opposed to those of the fallen minister, and were in agreement with 
those of the Bedford group ; the trouble lay in the fact that the chiefs of 
the Whig group made themselves personally intensely obnoxious to the 
king. For two years he had to bear the yoke, though he was restive 
enough under it ; and at the end of two years he could only free himself 
by calling to office, without Pitt himself, a group of Whigs whose most 
earnest wish was to serve under Pitt, and who sought to carry out a policy 
to which the king himself was intensely antagonistic. 

George Grenville, who became the real head of the administration on 
Bute's retirement, was a capable official, but at the same time an incarna- 
tion of official pedantry, to whom the letter was everything and the spirit 
nothing. His absorption in details entirely prevented him from taking 
comprehensive views, or from realising the existence of forces which could 
not be tabulated in Blue Books. He was wholly devoid of that tact which 
is born of a sympathetic understanding of divergent points of view, and he 
lacked also that sense of perspective which distinguishes between the im- 
portance of what is trivial and the importance of what is fundamental. 
Consequently during his administration the trivial blazed into prominence, 
and the fundamental was overlooked, with disastrous results. An un- 
scrupulous adventurer was enabled to pose as the martyr of Liberty in 

2 s 



642 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

order to salve the susceptibilities of the Government and the House of 
Commons, while the vital question of the relations between the mother 
country and the colonies was dealt with offhand as a mere byway of 
official routine. 

John Wilkes was a clever scamp, with the loosest of morals and a passion 
for notoriety, which was not satisfied by a wide reputation for reckless and 
indecent dissipation. Wilkes had started a paper called the North Briton, 
chiefly devoted to abuse of Bute, the Scots, and the Government. The king's 
speech at the opening of parliament claimed applause for the Peace of 
Paris, and, with a singular audacity, for the satisfactory terms obtained 
by Frederick. Wilkes in " Number 45 " of his paper very justly stigmatised 
this profession as a lie put into the mouth of the king by his ministers. 
George and the ministers were alike furious. A general warrant was issued 
for the arrest of the author printers and publishers of the paper, without 
mentioning the names of the parties. Wilkes was arrested, and his papers 
were searched without the formality of obtaining formal proof of the author- 
ship, and he himself was rigorously confined and forbidden the use of pen 
and ink. 

But when the matter came before Chief Justice Pratt, he ordered the 
release of Wilkes on the ground that members of parliament were immune 
from arrest, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace, categories 
under which Wilkes's offence could by no means be brought. Moreover, 
the Chief Justice pronounced that general warrants were illegal. The 
ministers, not content to let ill alone, went on to demand in the House of 
Commons that Number 45 should be burnt by the public hangman as a 
" false scurrilous and seditious libel " ; and the House of Lords carried an 
address praying that Wilkes should be prosecuted as the author of a certain 
obscene work entitled an Essay on Woman, which was produced by one of 
his old partners in debauchery and iniquity, Lord Sandwich, although 
the thing had never been published at all. Meanwhile Wilkes had betaken 
himself to France to escape the consequences of a duel ; in his absence he 
was outlawed and the House of Commons expelled him. At the same 
time the courts awarded him heavy damages for false imprisonment, and 
riots attested his popularity with the mob. The whole of the proceedings 
gave Wilkes an entirely fictitious importance, and at the same time brought 
into prominence the arrogant claims of the House of Commons, or of a 
temporary majority in the House of Commons, to assert its own authority 
as overriding that of the common law. The privileges of the Commons, 
the rights of the electorate, and the right of free criticism outside the House 
of Commons, were again a few years later to provide a battlefield between 
the champion of liberty and the champions of privilege. For the moment 
the victory rested with the Commons, because it was not safe for the outlaw 
to reappear in England ; but it was at the cost of their dignity and credit, 
and at the second encounter five years later they were very thoroughly 
worsted. 



THE THIRD GEORGE 643 

But even from a ministerial point of view the Wilkes affair was no more 
than an accident, though it was one to which their own conduct had given 
a preposterous importance in the eyes of the public. George Grenville's real 
business was retrenchment after the portentous expenditure on the war. 
The National Debt had swelled to alarming proportions, and it appeared to 
Grenville first that there must be an end of the long prevalent laxity in 
applying the revenue laws, and, secondly, that the American colonies in 
whose interests primarily Great Britain had entered upon the war, ought to 
make a substantial contribution to the expenses; propositions which were in 
themselves manifestly just. Therefore he proceeded to assert the technical 
rights of the mother country. Past governments had deliberately shut 
their eyes to the immense illicit traffic carried on by the Americans, their 
persistent disregard of the navigation laws, and their evasion of the customs 
duties. Instructions were issued that the smuggling was to be stopped, and 
ships of the Royal Navy were employed in the preventive service. Tb.6 
colonies were invited to consider and suggest proposals for laying them 
under contribution, but unfortunately Grenville had already made up his 
own mind that the contributions were to be obtained through the imposition 
of taxes by the British parliament — a scheme which took definite shape in 
the famous Stamp Act of 1765. 

Now, the colonists occupied the colonies under specific charters which 
reserved controlling powers to the Crown. The reservation of powers 
was admittedly a technical necessity ; emergencies might arise when their 
exercise would be imperative. On the other hand, it could plausibly be 
maintained that they were intended to be used only on emergency ; that 
apart from emergencies the colonies were entitled to regard themselves 
and to be regarded as autonomous states. In one respect at least that claim 
had never been admitted in England ; it had at all times been assumed 
that the mother country was entitled to impose trade regulations on the 
colonists for her own protection, though the colonists might suffer. Also 
from time to time the Crown had interfered with the governments of 
particular colonies ; but its doing so had always been resented, though the 
colonists had found themselves obliged to submit. 

In fact the consciousness had hitherto been ever present with them, 
that they depended on the mother country for security against their French 
rivals. Detached from each other and without any central government, 
they might still have held their own against the French colonists in actual 
occupation of Canada and Louisiana ; but if France herself took up the 
cause, they would be overwhelmed unless they could rely on British fleets 
and British regiments to support them. Therefore although they had 
grumbled, and on occasion had gone beyond grumbling, they had still on 
the whole accepted the control exercised from the old country as something 
which must be endured. 

But the situation had been fundamentally changed by the war. The 
militia of the several colonies felt themselves able to cope with the Red 



644 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Indians, and now they had nothing to fear from France. It ceased to be 
tacitly assumed that the protection of the mother country was a necessity 
which was worth purchasing at the price of a subjection which only made 
itself felt intermittently. It was, in fact, certain that the colonists would 




Bartholomew, Uin h - 



very soon demand a relaxation even of the technical authority asserted by 
the home government, laid down by the charters, and confirmed by 
practice throughout the century and a half which covered the lifetime of 
every colony except Virginia. 

Now although there were already revolutionary spirits who would have 



THE THIRD GEORGE 645 

been by no means reluctant to demand complete independence, the great 
bulk of the Americans would have indignantly repudiated the idea of sepa- 
ration. They were in fact aware that they were very much indebted to 
the mother country for deliverance from the French menace, and in the 
abstract they were even quite willing to admit a moral obligation to repay 
a little of what Great Britain had spent primarily on their behalf. But 
there was no technical obligation to do so, and it was not difficult to main- 
tain that the mother country was after all fairly compensated by the benefits 
that would accrue to it from the acquisition of Canada. A minister at 
Westminster with any real grasp of the situation would have used the 
occasion to encourage the sentiment of loyalty to the Empire by every 
means in his power, while appealing to colonial patriotism and gratitude to 
lighten the financial burden which the recent war had entailed upon Great 
Britain. Unhappily, Grenville could think of nothing but the relief of that 
burden. He did not believe that appeals to patriotism and loyalty would 
meet with an adequate response in hard cash. The states might feel con- 
scious of their obligations as a body, but individually each would discover 
very good reasons why its neighbours were in duty bound to pay a much 
larger proportion than itself ; and there was no common authority to lay 
down a general principle of contribution or to assess the respective shares 
of the^ different states. Grenville then having rejected the idea of a volun- 
tary thank-offering, and having no idea of conciliating popular feeling, 
there remained to him the technical power of imposing and enforcing 
taxation for the purposes of revenue. In order to provide revenue the 
existing customs were enforced, and the new Stamp Act was passed, almost 
unnoticed in England. 

In effect the minister at one breath informed the colonists that he had 
no confidence in their loyalty or gratitude, laid on them a new burden, 
which, while trifling in itself, was galling in the method of its application, 
and emphasised precisely what was most irritating to the colonists in the 
relations between them and the mother country. In dealing with the 
colonies the British parliament claimed to override what for England the 
English parliament had asserted to be the elementary right of English 
citizenship in that last palladium of English liberties, the Bill of Rights. 
No one should be taxed save by consent of a representative parliament, 
and the parliament at Westminster was in no conceivable sense represen- 
tative of the colonies. There was an immediate outcry that such taxation 
was a monstrous and unprecedented innovation, in defiance of the base 
principles of English citizenship. 

Perhaps we are apt at first sight to wonder why the new tax was treated 
as a monstrous innovation. The colonies were accustomed to duties paid 
at the ports imposed by the home government ; why should they have 
resented the imposition of the Stamp Tax, which required a stamp to be 
purchased and affixed to give validity to legal documents ? The explanation 
is that a " tax " in the technical sense was taken to mean an impost levied 



646 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

for the purpose of raising revenue. The customs at the ports were, 
theoretically at least, levied not with the intention of raising a revenue, but 
in order to control trade and develop trade in the national interest. Thus, 
for instance, French wines were heavily taxed in British ports not because 
the toll upon them brought money into the treasury, but in order to check 
the purchase of French wines. Portuguese wines were lightly taxed, not 
because a larger revenue came in from lightly taxed goods than from heavily 
taxed goods, but in order to encourage the Portuguese trade. The 
Americans had been subjected to the payment of customs duties on the 
same principles. In the same way in the Plantagenet times the " ancient 
customs " for the regulation of trade were levied by the king by royal 
prerogative ; parliament resisted any extension of the tolls by royal pre- 
rogative precisely because extension was attempted in order to provide 
revenue. The continued regulation of colonial trade by the king in parlia- 
ment at Westminster was no breach of the established principles, for the 
king had merely handed over to parliament certain particular functions, 
theoretically as a matter of administrative convenience. Trade regulation 
was a burden which the colonies would not have borne much longer in 
any case ; but a new and suspicious aspect was given to the existing system 
when the revenue laws began to be rigorously enforced avowedly for the 
purpose of increasing the revenue ; and a definite innovation declared itself 
when an unmistakable tax was imposed, an internal tax for which there 
was no precedent, a tax which had nothing whatever to do with the regula- 
tion of trade, for the sole purpose of raising revenue. Here at last was 
actual taxation without representation. Even if the right did legally exist, 
even if it was a right of which the home government could not with 
safety technically deprive itself, its actual exercise was without precedent, 
and provided the colonists with precisely that technical ground of complaint 
which had before been lacking. The colonists were presented with a 
constitutional formula, " No taxation without representation," a formula to 
which it was difficult for Whigs, who professed to be the guardians of the 
principles of the Revolution of 1688, to close their ears. 

Ministers were wholly unconscious of the importance of the issue which 
they had raised. The amount of the tax was not great, and it was taken 
for granted that opposition would be merely superficial. There was no 
practical possibility of giving colonists direct representation in the parlia- 
ment at Westminster ; no adequate response could be anticipated to an 
appeal for a voluntary contribution ; and they had followed the merely 
obvious course in exercising a right which, as an actual matter of law, they 
did possess. The colonists would soon find that the burden imposed was 
too slight to be a real grievance. The colonists took a different view. 
One after another their assemblies passed resolutions denying the power 
of taxation. At the instance of Massachusetts the various assemblies sent 
delegates to a general congress at New York, where the unanimity of 
colonial feeling found expression. Associations were formed for the boy- 



THE THIRD GEORGE 647 

cotting of imported goods until the Stamp Act should be repealed. Riots 
took place in Boston and elsewhere ; the officials nominated for the 
administration of the Stamp Act refused the appointments or were threatened 
into resigning ; when the stamps themselves arrived it was obvious that 
they would never be distributed ; for the most part they were seized and 
destroyed. In England the mercantile community at once suffered from 
the pressure of the boycott, and was strongly in favour of the repeal of 
the Act. 

Meanwhile, other events brought the antagonism of the king and the 
ministry to a head, for on the colonial question itself King George was 
practically at one with Grenville. George developed symptoms of the brain 
trouble which so completely darkened the last years of his life. It became 
necessary to provide for a regency in case the king should be incapacitated. 
Ministers were bent on excluding George's mother, the Dowager Princess 
of Wales, believing that if she became regent Bute would recover his 
ascendency. They persuaded the king to approve the omission of her 
name from the list of eligible persons by declaring that the House of 
Commons would certainly demand it, and a very awkward situation would 
be created. The king assented with reluctance; the Regency Bill was 
brought in — and the House of Commons proceeded to add the Princess 
of Wales to the list of possible regents. The king, who recovered his 
health for a time, was furious with the ministers, and determined to 
dispense with their services at any price. Twice he sent for Pitt and 
entreated him to form a government ; twice Pitt refused, because his 
brother-in-law, Lord Temple, insisted upon impossible terms, and he 
would not separate himself from Temple. George had no alternative but 
an appeal to the Whigs who associated themselves with Pitt's principles, 
and a ministry was constructed in July (1765) by the Marquis of 
Rockingham. 



IV 

THE ROCKINGHAMS AND THE EARL OF CHATHAM 

The old Whig connection which for a time had worked successfully in 
the days of the coalition between Pitt and Newcastle had been broken up. 
Even in those days, when its ranks included several men of marked ability 
and experience in affairs, it had not been productive of leaders. The 
Rockingham group represented the survival of that Whig tradition, but the 
individuals who formed it were for the most part comparatively young 
men of talent which could at the best be called respectable, and they 
were wanting in experience. More conspicuously than ever the Govern- 
ment rested upon family connection ; it carried little weight, and was 
regarded with little confidence. It was a makeshift Government, brought 



648 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

into being and preserved by the reluctant support of the king and the 
court party which the king had created, a support which was certain to be 
withdrawn as soon as the downfall of the ministry should be compatible 
with some alternative to the return of Grenville and Bedford. Pitt, 
although it was his own fault that he was not at the head of the govern- 
ment, chose somewhat ostentatiously to express mistrust of the men who 
for the most part would have been only too willing to submit themselves 

to his direct guidance. 

The ministers did not 
formulate a definite pro- 
gramme ; it was not till 
the end of the year that 
they decided to reverse 
Grenville's American 
policy. In this decision 
they were guided mainly 
by the opinions of Pitt 
himself, who laid it down 
that the British parlia- 
ment had no right to 
impose taxes, though it 
had the power of legis- 
lation for the colonies. 
Parliament did not meet 
till January 1766, when 
for the first time a new 
and notable figure ap- 
peared among its mem- 
bers — Rockingham's 
secretary, Edmund Burke. 
With the support of Pitt, 
the Government brought 
in and carried by substantial majorities a bill for the repeal of the Stamp 
Act ; and, in spite, of his opposition, an accompanying Declaratory Act 
affirming the legal authority of parliament to impose taxation. The latter, 
in fact, was passed merely in order to save the self-respect of parliament ; 
it was a purely formal declaration, intended to be in practice a dead letter. 
During their brief tenure of power the ministry applied to America Walpole's 
principle of reducing tariffs, of which the Americans certainly could not 
complain, while its wisdom was demonstrated by the increased revenue 
which accrued. Smuggling in order to evade the reduced duties was not 
worth while; the lowered price following the lower duties extended the 
demand, and there was a very substantial increase in the quantity of goods 
on which duty was paid. 

But there was no confidence between the Crown and the ministers. 




William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. 
[From the painting by R. Brompton. ] 



THE THIRD GEORGE 649 

King George in the course of a single week had authorised first Rockingham 
to say that he was in favour of the repeal of the Stamp Act, and then a 
member of the court party, now known as the " king's friends," to say that he 
was opposed to it. He explained the matter to Rockingham by saying that 
while he was in favour of repeal as opposed to the simple retention of the 
Act, what he desired was not its repeal but its modification. But the incident 
was a most unmistakable sign that he had no intention of giving the 
ministry his countenance longer than he could help. 

It became known that Pitt was ready to resume office on his own 
terms, and no longer on terms dictated by Temple. But Rockingham, on 
approaching him, found that his terms meant a dictatorship, and a recon- 
struction of the ministry to which Rockingham could not with honour make 
himself a party. Pitt would not recognise the Whig connection ; he 
would not work in conjunction with Newcastle, who was no longer a power, 
or with some other members of the ministry, and he would bring in other 
men who could not assimilate with the Rockingham group. Some of the 
warmer personal adherents of Pitt resigned, the administration came to an 
end, and once more Pitt returned to the helm. 

Pitt's desire was to rule without party, to ignore party ties altogether ; 
and he collected round him a singularly heterogeneous group of ministers 
gathered from every quarter — members of Rockingham's ministry, personal 
adherents of his own, king's friends, and others. What he might have 
done with such a body in the plenitude of his powers we cannot say. 
Assuredly he had large designs. The American question appeared to have 
been cleared out of the way. He would certainly have sought to re- 
invigorate the public services, which had achieved such a splendid efficiency 
under his previous regime, but had drifted rapidly towards decay under the 
Grenville policy of extreme retrenchment. He was certainly meditating 
the transfer to the Crown of the territorial sovereignty which the East 
India Company had acquired in India. But within a few months of his 
assumption of office the direction passed out of his hands. His popularity 
in the country and his personal effectiveness in parliament suffered 
grievously when the "Great Commoner," as he had hitherto been called, 
accepted a peerage, and was transferred from the representative chamber to 
the House of Lords with the title of Earl of Chatham. But more serious 
still was the breakdown of his physical and intellectual powers, brought on 
by the gout of which he was an unhappy victim. His sufferings exaggerated 
his natural arrogance and irritability until he became almost intolerable as 
a colleague, and then incapacitated him altogether for taking any part 
in public business. After the first month of 1767 the ministry, of which 
Lord Grafton was the figurehead, ceased to be in any sense Chatham's 
ministry. The things that Chatham would have done were left undone ; 
the things that were done were precisely the things that Chatham would have 
condemned. 



650 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

V 
TOWNSHEND'S TAXES AND JOHN WILKES 

Chatham in 1766 had no time to do more than take the first steps 
towards carrying out the foreign policy which he desired. The Family 
Compact had been a warning that neither France nor the new government 
in Spain had forgotten the old scheme for advancing the Bourbons, and 
the Peace of Paris had dealt with these powers tenderly enough to make 
the revival of those schemes a possibility. Chatham designed a general 
alliance of the Northern Powers, which would have very thoroughly 
bridled Bourbon ambitions. Frederick, however, was not greatly troubled 
by Bourbon ambitions ; he was now intent rather upon the dismemberment 
for his own advantage of the kingdom of Poland. Also, while he had the 
highest admiration for Chatham, he had no sort of security that that states- 
man would remain in power in England, and he was not at all disposed to 
risk a repetition of the treatment he had experienced in 1762. It is likely 
therefore that Chatham would in any case have failed in achieving his 
Northern Alliance. 

But failure in this direction would not have induced him, as it induced 
the Grafton ministry, to forget that British interests might be affected by 
affairs in Europe. British interests perhaps did not suffer in consequence, 
at least directly. But the isolation of Great Britain, for which Bute had 
been primarily responsible, was intensified, and one curious result of her 
indifference to European affairs is to be noted. The island of Corsica was 
subject to the republic of Genoa; but the subjection was very much against 
the will of the Corsicans. Corsican patriots, led by Paoli, resisted the 
Genoese government and defied all efforts to suppress them. The insur- 
gents offered the sovereignty to Great Britain. Great Britain declined it ; 
Genoa ceded the sovereignty to France, and Napoleon Buonaparte was born 
a few months afterwards a French instead of a British subject. 

Chatham was no sooner incapacitated than his Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, Charles Townshend, took the leading place in the House of 
Commons, and, with a light heart, conducted it along a path which it was quite 
willing to tread, but upon which Chatham would never have allowed it to set 
foot. In America the repeal of the Stamp Act had allayed the public excite- 
ment, but had scarcely produced the effect hoped for. The colonials in 
fact conceived not that the British Government had made a magnanimous 
concession for which they ought to be grateful, but that it had been forced 
to give way. Their tone irritated English sentiment, which before had 
been rather favourably disposed towards them. Townshend at once 
proposed, as a practical corollary to the Declaratory Act of the Rocking- 
ham ministry, to impose new taxes — taxes upon imports, and therefore 



THE THIRD GEORGE 651 

not without ample precedent, but taxes for revenue, and therefore entirely 
obnoxious. 

The taxes themselves were trivial ; the revenue expected to be derived 
from them was only some forty thousand pounds. Glass, red and white 
lead, painters' colours, paper and tea were the imports upon which the new 
duties were laid. Of the whole group none was of the slightest importance 
except the last, and the tea tax was actually so arranged as to reduce the 
cost of the tea to the American consumers. In the ordinary course tea 
could only be carried to America after paying duty at a port in Great Britain. 
The duty now imposed at the American ports was not added to the duty at 
the British ports, but was a lower duty substituted for the latter. Financially 




" A View of the Town of Boston in New England, and British Ships of War landing their troops." 
[From a print engraved and published by Paul Revere at Boston in 1768.] 

the thing was a boon rather than a grievance. But a principle was at 
stake, not pounds shillings and pence. All the mollifying effects of the 
repeal of the Stamp Act were swept away, all the latent irritation broke 
out with renewed vehemence. In plain terms, the public at large and 
nearly all the leaders both in Great Britain and in America lost their 
tempers, and therewith the capacity for appreciating what was i easonable in 
the attitude of the other side. 

When once mutual distrust has been generated the smallest points of 
friction become exaggerated, and the utmost tact and skill are always 
needed to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. But the difficulties are 
indefinitely increased when the parties are remote from each other and 
communication is slow. Knowledge of the mother country in the colonies 
was limited ; knowledge of the colonies in the mother country was infini- 



652 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

tesimal. Despatches from colonial agents in London and from government 
officials in the colonies took a very long time in passing ; between the 
forwarding of a document and the receipt of a reply there was time for the 
whole situation to become completely changed. It is difficult enough even 
at the present day, when a trip to the remotest parts of the Empire pro- 
vides a holiday amusement for persons of leisure, when the speech of a 
statesman in London may be printed and discussed in Melbourne and 
Montreal twenty-four hours after its delivery, for the British public to gauge 
accurately the views of Canadians and Australians, and vice versa. A hundred 
and fifty years ago it was infinitely more difficult for Westminster to be 
really in touch with Massachusetts and Virginia. The quarrel between 
Great Britain and the colonies may have been actually incapable of adjust- 
ment ; but conditions of the time, which we of necessity have the utmost 
difficulty in realising, made the chances of adjustment infinitely less. 

In America, then, the associations for exclusive dealing at once revived 
the activities which they had suspended when the Stamp Act was repealed. 
Illicit traffic and the evasion of customs became laudable aims for respect- 
able, law-abiding citizens, while the officers of the law became the minions of 
tyranny. And at the same time in the eyes of the British public in general 
the Americans appeared to be revolutionary anarchists, with whom it was 
hardly possible for the law-loving Briton to sympathise, and for whom it 
was not easy even to make allowances. There was, indeed, a strong body 
of enlightened opinion which appreciated the reality of the American 
grievance, and perhaps weakened its own case with the public by the 
vigour of its expressions of sympathy ; but there can be no doubt that the 
great mass of public opinion in Great Britain was entirely on the side of 
ministers. 

The arch mischief-maker, Charles Townshend, died three months after 
he had fired the train. His place as Chancellor of the Exchequer was 
taken by the Tory Lord North, with whom allegiance to the king was a 
first principle. The ministers who were most inclined to maintain Chatham's 
views carried the least weight in a ministry to which were now admitted 
some members of the old Bedford connection, who showed themselves en- 
tirely ready to bow to the king's direction, while in the nature of things 
they were at one with the Crown on the real question of the hour. In 
1768 parliament was dissolved and ministers returned with renewed strength, 
while there was still no sign of a recovery of health on Chatham's part 
which would enable him to emerge from his retirement. 

The general election provided a fresh excitement which absorbed much 
popular attention. John Wilkes, though still under sentence of outlawry, 
reappeared and stood for the City of London ; being there rejected, he 
came forward as a candidate for the county of Middlesex, and was returned 
by a large majority. Unfortunately King George was vindictive, and he 
was irritated by Wilkes's popularity with the mob. Wilkes was arrested 
upon the sentence of outlawry ; there were riots, collisions between the 



THE THIRD GEORGE 653 

mob and the soldiery, who fired upon the rioters and killed or wounded a 
few. Wilkes, in prison, procured a copy of the order from the Secretary of 
State, Lord Weymouth, under which the soldiery had acted. He published 
it with comments, accusing Weymouth of having planned the "massacre." 
The publication was followed by a motion for the expulsion of Wilkes from the 
House, based on the old charges. In spite of the remonstrances of Grenville 
as well as of Burke the expulsion was carried by a large majority. A fortnight 
later Wilkes was re-elected. The House annulled the election, and declared 
him incapable of sitting in the 
present parliament ; never- 
theless he was again elected 
for the third time, for it was 
an entirely novel claim that 
the House should by its own 
authority, without colour of 
any law, declare any one 
incapable of election. The 
House again annulled the 
election. A certain Colonel 
Luttrell was procured to 
stand for Middlesex against 
Wilkes, and when Wilkes 
was again returned with a 
big majority over Luttrell, 
the House nevertheless pro- 
nounced that Luttrell was 
the duly elected member. 
The House of Commons 
had asserted the right of 
overriding the will of the 
electorate by the mere re- 
solution of a party majority. 

Wilkes was erected into the position of the champion of popular liberties 
against the arbitrary privileges of the House of Commons, far more de- 
cisively than in the earlier encounter. 

The Crown of o.ld, by straining prerogative beyond limits for which 
there was clear precedent, had brought upon itself the curtailment of pre- 
rogative. The Commons now by an extravagant insistence on their own 
privileges, not as against the Crown but as against the general public, 
brought upon themselves a curtailment of privileges. Wilkes, the rejected 
of the House, was made an alderman of the City of London, which gave 
expression to the popular antagonism. A conflict on a question of juris- 
diction between the House and the City was mixed up with the general 
question of the liberty of the press, and the result of the conflict was the 
victory of the press. 




Wilkes assuring George III. that he had never been a Wilkite. 
[From the caricature by Gillray. ] 



654 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

There were two questions involved ; one concerned parliamentary 
privilege, the other the law of libel. Technically, until this time parlia- 
mentary debates had been private ; their publication was forbidden as a 
breach of the privileges of the Houses, while anything in the nature of 
comment was liable to be construed as libel. Nevertheless reports under 
very flimsy disguises found their way into print, and the press of the day 
was frequently both caustic and scurrilous. The House of Commons 
sought to protect itself by a rigorous application of the law of libel, 
and it was laid down by Lord Mansfield that juries were concerned only 
with the fact of publication, while everything else lay in the province of the 
judge. The general result was that juries refused to convict even in the 
face of unmistakable evidence ; it became obvious that the publication of 
distorted reports and of comment thereon could not be prevented ; and not 
less obvious that in the circumstances it would be very much safer to 
permit the open and avowed publication of reports, which would at least 
ensure approximate accuracy instead of deliberate distortion. A later result 
was the definite transfer of the decision as to the character of publications 
from the judge to the jury ; and thus in effect the quarrel between Wilkes 
and the Commons secured the liberty of the press at least within the limits 
approved by public opinion. And at the same time the exercise of the 
undisputed right of the House of Commons to decide questions concerning 
elections was first delegated to a non-partisan committee instead of to 
the decision of a party vote, and was ultimately transferred to the 
judges. 

At the end of 1768 Shelburne, the minister most favourable to the 
colonists, was driven from office, and this was shortly followed by the 
formal resignation of Chatham, who was recovering from his illness only to 
find that he was completely opposed to his nominal colleagues in their 
policy with regard both to Wilkes and to the colonies. Grafton, the 
nominal head of the government, sought again to conciliate American 
opinion by repealing Townshend's duties ; but matters were only made 
worse when his colleagues insisted on retaining that upon tea. The 
Americans did not in the least care aboutthe specific articles which Townshend 
had taxed ; from their point of view there was just as much reason for 
resisting the tax on one article as on half-a-dozen. On the top of this 
the Bedford group proposed to act upon a statute of Henry VIII. which 
had not been applied for a couple of centuries, and to transfer the trials of 
rioters in America to a part of the country where there was no disaffection 
— in other words, to England. Chatham, now back in the House of Lords, 
flung his thunderbolts at the government ; Campden, followed by Grafton, 
resigned ; and so in 1770 the king was able to form an administration 
entirely after his own heart with Lord North at the head of it. 



THE THIRD GEORGE 655 



VI 
INDIA 

During the first ten years of King George's reign changes of importance 
were taking place in India. There were fresh developments in the expan- 
sion of the native powers, while the British were making their first 
experiments as rulers, at first de facto and then dejure, over great provinces 
in the dominions of the Mogul. In the twenty years between the appoint- 
ment of Dupleix as governor of Pondichery, and the capture of Pondichery 
which signalised the complete overthrow of French power in India, the 
potentates directly affected by the struggle were the Nizam of the Deccan, 
his lieutenant the Nawab of the Carnatic, and the Nawab of Bengal. Both 
the nawabs had become merely puppets in the hands of the British, the 
nizam's power had become greatly curtailed, and the power of the 
Marathas, over whom the old nizam had exercised an appreciable dominion, 
had grown very greatly. It was the first time for centuries that a great 
Hindu power was getting itself organised in the peninsula, of which much 
the greater part had habitually been dominated by dynasties of Moham- 
medan^conquerors of Turkish or Afghan descent, until the Moguls had won 
for themselves recognition as lords paramount of the whole. 

The Maratha confederacy threatened to convert the Mogul into its 
puppet and to dominate all India, since the solidarity of the Mogul Empire 
had become a transparent fiction. But, naturally enough, it did not as yet 
occur to the Marathas that the weakening of the nizam could be of anything 
but advantage to them ; that they were to find far more dangerous rivals 
and antagonists in the British, whose fighting qualities were wholly unknown 
before Clive's defence of Arcot. From time immemorial the Hindu had 
turned his eyes to the north-west and the mountain passes of Afghanistan 
as the region whence attack was to be expected ; and the plan of the Marathas 
was to dominate the Mogul and carry their sway up to the Indus. In 
Central India their supremacy was already assured ; and the potentates of 
Oudh and Bengal stood in awe of them, and generally paid them the 
tribute or black-mail called chauth. 

Now the Maratha expansion towards the north-west was a direct 
challenge to the ruler of Kabul, who looked upon the north-west as his own. 
In 1 76 1 Ahmed Shah came down from Kabul with a mighty army and 
smote the Marathas on the favourite battlefield of Paniput, in the Delhi 
district. The Afghan was a mighty raider, but no organiser of govern- 
ment ; and when he had shattered the Marathas he went back across the 
hills. But the practical effect of the conflict was to reduce the Maratha 
power and check its attempts at aggression for some years, and this in itself 
facilitated the sudden growth of a new power in the south. A Moham- 



656 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

medan military adventurer of genius, Haidar Naik, afterwards known as 
Haidar AH, having obtained the command of the armies of the Hindu 
state of Mysore, seized the throne for himself in 1762, and so developed the 
military organisation that in a very short time Mysore was fully a match for 
any of its native rivals. 

It is sufficiently obvious that there was no Empire of India for Clive 
or any one else to overthrow, except in the sense that various potentates 
professed to acknowledge the common sovereignty of the Mogul, and gave 
a colour of legality to their own actions by doing them in his name when 
they thought it worth while. But this fiction of the Mogul's sovereignty was 
preserved as carefully by the British as by any one else until the nineteenth 
century. What the British did during the eighteenth century was merely to 
establish themselves as one among several territorial powers among whom 
their intention was to preserve a balance. But because each of the native 
powers saw in the British the most serious obstacle to its own achievement 
of ascendency, one after another they forced contests on the British, 
whereby their own power was diminished and that of the British was in- 
creased until it grew into an acknowledged ascendency. 

When Clive returned to England in 1760 the British were a territorial 
power de facto in Bengal and in the Carnatic, because the nawabs in both 
those provinces were completely under their control. But de jure they 
were still in possession of nothing but the districts immediately round 
Madras and Bombay, together with the Sarkars, which they held as a fief 
from the nizam. The British government at home had not taken charge, 
the British authority was that of the East India Company. There could be 
no permanence about an irregular control such as existed in Bengal, where 
Mir Jafar had to obey the orders of the company's officers forming the 
council at Calcutta, while the council itself declined all responsibility for 
the administration. They demanded for themselves privileges and exemp- 
tions, accepted the presents which were lavished upon them after the 
oriental fashion, and practically extorted a good deal more. It was not 
strange that when Clive's strong mastery was withdrawn the British in 
Bengal abused their position. The subordinates in a commercial company, 
suddenly placed in a position of immense actual power without official 
responsibility, would hardly have been human if they had not abused their 
position ; they had behind them no tradition to live up to, and the tempta- 
tions were overwhelming. 

Mir Jafar found himself unable to meet the demands which were made 
upon him ; the council deposed him, and made his finance minister, Mir 
Kassim, nawab. Mir Kassim laid his plans to free himself from the 
British tyranny, which the governor, Vansittart, a person of good intentions, 
was unable to check. The result was another revolution. Mir Kassim 
fled to Shujah Daulah, the Nawab of Oudh, and Mir Jafar was set up 
again. Then once more Shujah Daulah prepared to invade Bengal and 
subject it to Oudh ; but Major Hector Munro, by a brilliant feat of arms 



THE THIRD GEORGE 657 

worthy of Clive himself, inflicted upon him a decisive defeat at Buxar, and 
convinced him of the wisdom of seeking British friendship. Buxar was 
hardly less important than Plassey in the establishment of the British 
power in Bengal. 

But by this time the directors in England had become impressed with 
the necessity for putting an end to the misrule which their representatives 
in India were turning to their private account and not to the benefit of the 
company. Once more Clive was sent out to India with full powers to take 
matters in hand and organise the government. He set himself, on his 
arrival in 1765, to cure the existing evils by drastic measures, and to 
remove the worst of the causes from which they sprang. The receiving 
of presents and all private trading by the company's servants were im- 
peratively forbidden ; while the profits of the salt monopoly, which had been 
conceded to the company, were appropriated to the increase of the hitherto 
despicable salaries of the company's servants. This measure, however, was 
unfortunately modified by the directors, with the result that the private 
trading and the receiving of presents revived. The army in Bengal was 
reorganised, and its control was officially taken over by the company ; and, 
further, the collection and administration of the revenue, what is called 
the diwani, in Bengal, was conferred upon the company by a decree of the 
Mogul as suzerain, procured by Clive. The position of the British was 
regulated ; they were not only rulers de facto but were thenceforth re- 
sponsible dejure. The Diwani of Bengal, the cession of the Sarkars to the 
British, and the formal separation of the Carnatic from the nizam's juris- 
diction, were all obtained under the sanction of the Mogul's authority in 
August 1765. The British East India Company had become a legally 
constituted territorial power, and the repudiation of its authority could be 
accurately represented as an act of rebellion against the Mogul. 

Before leaving India Clive also laid down the general principles of 
foreign policy. There was to be no attempt at the extension of dominion. 
Oudh was not penalised, but was to be strengthened into a buffer state 
against Maratha aggression in the north. In like manner the nizam was 
to be supported against Maratha aggression in the south. At the beginning 
of 1767 Clive again retired to England. The foundations of British power 
had been laid, but a working political system still had to be evolved. 
Chatham's scheme fqr transferring the sovereignty in England from the 
company to the Crown came to nothing ; but it was impossible for the 
British nation long to ignore its responsibilities. The next experimental 
phase is represented by the ministry of Lord North in England and the 
rule of Warren Hastings in India. 



2 T 



CHAPTER XXVII 

CLEAVAGE 

I 

THE BREACH WIDENS 

WITH the formation of Lord North's ministry, King George's victory in 
parliament was complete. The most definite dividing line between Govern- 
ment and Opposition was fixed by colonial policy, and the Opposition 
included the whole of the Rockingham connection, together with Burke, 
the great exponent of Whig political philosophy, Chatham and all those 
who still revered him, and some even of those whom Charles Townshend 
had dragged with him more or less reluctantly. The king had secured 
the solid support of Toryism, of the group who, by whatever name they 
called themselves, regarded it as their first duty to carry out the king's 
wishes, and of the bulk of the Bedford Whigs who had brought the quarrel 
with America to a head and were rigid in their demands for a firm 
and uncompromising attitude. The king was not possessed of a merely 
accidental majority in the House of Commons ; between boroughs whose 
vote was under direct control and constituencies which had been fairly 
bought, the majority was secure. There was no risk of the Government 
being defeated in parliament, and practically none that it would be defeated 
on appealing to the country. And virtually the majority was pledged to 
carry out the king's wishes. 

There were three questions with which North's Government had to deal 
between 1770 and 1775. The first has already been discussed in con- 
nection with Wilkes. The second was India, which for the present we 
defer ; and the third was the quarrel with the colonies. 

The partial repeal of the obnoxious taxes failed entirely to produce the 
effect intended. Rioting did not cease, and the worst kind of agitators in 
America found a help to inflaming popular feeling in the " Boston massacre," 
an affray between the soldiers and the mob in which three of the latter 
were killed and a half-a-dozen more were wounded. A Boston jury 
acquitted the soldiers of blame, but when passions have been excited such 
occurrences acquire a fictitious colour and a fictitious importance. Still, 
for some time the agitation only simmered ; the colonials, for the most 
part, contented themselves with refusing to drink tea. Then in 1772 the 
royal schooner Gaspee> engaged on preventive service, was decoyed into 

658 



CLEAVAGE 659 

shallows, where she grounded and was then boarded and burnt ; nor could 
any information be obtained as to the perpetrators. The resistance to 
the importation of the boycotted goods was more carefully organised ; 
the Americans who supported the home government were subjected to a 
persistent persecution. Ship loads of tea when they arrived at American 
ports, if disembarked at all, found no purchasers, and for the most part 
the ships sailed away again without unloading, At the end of 1773 such a 
consignment of the East India Company's tea arrived in Boston harbour. 
The consignees were the sons of the British Governor, Hutchinson. 
Hutchinson forbade the ships to sail till they had paid the duties ; the 
Bostonians refused to allow the tea to be landed. One evening, after a 
great public meeting, a party of pretended Red Indians boarded the tea 
ships in the presence of an applauding multitude which watched operations 
from the shore, and emptied the tea chests into the sea. No one revealed 
the identity of the « Indians " ; the entire city of Boston shared the responsi- 
bility. . * ' ' ' 

Meanwhile public sentiment had been inflamed on both sides of the 
Atlantic by the publication of certain letters written to a private correspondent 
in London by Hutchinson the Governor and Oliver the Chief Justice of 
Massachusetts. Both men were honest supporters of the British government, 
and expressed their opinions with the natural freedom of private letters. 
Those letters, by some means unknown, fell into the hands of Benjamin 
Franklin, who was in London as agent for several of the colonies. In 
America the publication infuriated the colonials against the writers of the 
letters, while in England it infuriated most people against the men re- 
sponsible for an entirely unjustifiable divulgence of a private correspon- 
dence. A bitter attack was made upon Franklin, which he never forgave. 
Hitherto he had at any rate believed in the possibility of an honourable 
adjustment ; henceforth he was to be numbered amongst the irreconcil- 
ables. The letter incident and the Boston tl tea-party " between them had 
an exasperating effect, which perhaps destroyed the last chance of a peaceful 
solution. 

For now the British Government, with British sentiment behind it, 
resolved upon penal measures directed against Massachusetts. Boston 
harbour was closed, the seat of the government was removed from Boston 
to Salem, the constitution was suspended ; the venue for trials of officers 
of the Crown on capital charges was transferred to England, and troops 
were ordered to be quartered upon the town, which was required to pay 
compensation to the East India Company for the tea destroyed. 

At the same moment an entirely admirable Act was passed for the 
government of Canada. It emanated not from the brains of George's 
ministers, but from the statesmanship of Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards 
Lord Dorchester, who had for some years been Governor of Canada. 
While the Quebec Act extended the boundaries of Canada, it secured for the 
Roman Catholics complete freedom of worship and preserved their endow- 



66o THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

ments, nine-tenths of the Canadians being of the religion which was pro- 
scribed in Ireland and in Great Britain. It is an extraordinary paradox 
that Chatham opposed, while King George supported, this surprisingly 
liberal measure. But, further, the government was placed in the hands 
of a Governor and a Legislative Council of Crown nominees, the right of 
taxation was expressly reserved to the parliament of Great Britain, and the 
English Criminal Law was introduced while the old French Civil Law 
was retained. The religious and social institutious of the French popula- 
tion were thus fully protected, and they had no desire for an extension to 
them of political rights which they had never possessed under the French 
flag. Nevertheless this excellent measure was an additional source of 
irritation to their neighbours in British colonies. To the New Englanders 
in particular, with their Puritan tradition, and to the Virginians with their 
Anglican Cavalier tradition, the latitude allowed to the Romanists was a 
scandal ; while the political constitution was looked upon as ominious of 
what the British Government intended to impose upon the old British 
colonies. 

Again the assemblies of the thirteen colonies, or of twelve of them, 
since the youngest, Georgia, did not yet associate itself with the rest, sent 
delegates to a general il Continental Congress," which met at Philadelphia 
in September (1774). In that Congress, although there were as yet few 
who had brought themselves to welcome the idea of separation, the dominant 
voices were those of the men who had already made up their minds to 
work for that object, and with them lay the skill of political organisation. 
The Congress demanded the repeal of the whole series of obnoxious Acts, 
endorsed a policy of something more than passive resistance to the carry- 
ing out of the laws imposed by the British parliament, sanctioned the prin- 
ciple of the boycott, drew up a new Declaration of Rights, and addressed 
a petition to the king, and what may be called an open letter to the people 
of England. They claimed, in short, a return to the position as it was 
before 1763 ; but at the same time they expressly repudiated the idea that 
they desired separation. Congress voted by states, and the states voted 
solidly together with the exception of New York. It need hardly be re- 
marked, however, that the congress had no legal powers, .the sanction for 
its authority residing only in the Assemblies of the several states. 

Massachusetts, which had taken the lead in the agitation and had been 
singled out for punishment, took the lead also in preparation for armed 
resistance. The new governor and commander-in-chief, General Gage, 
refused to summon the Assembly of the province ; nevertheless it was 
elected and met, and was obeyed precisely as if it had been a legal body. 
Volunteer corps were organised and drilled, and military stores were 
collected. Gage, who had four British regiments at his disposal, for the 
most part massed in Boston, urged the home government to send him 
more troops. He did not get his troops, and North's Government made 
a belated offer which was intended to be conciliatory — the offer to exempt 



CLEAVAGE 66 1 

from taxation any colony which elected to make such a contribution of its 
own to the Imperial Exchequer as satisfied the Imperial parliament. At 
this stage the proposal was worse than useless, and it was accompanied by 
other retaliatory measures against the colonists, closing American ports, 
excluding all American trade, and voting an increase of troops for 
Boston. It was in vain for Burke, Chatham, and the Rockinghams to 
present the case for the colonies to parliament. They were completely 
out-voted, and the majority in parliament was supported by the great body 
of popular opinion. 



II 



FROM LEXINGTON TO SARATOGA 

The War of American Independence was opened by the skirmish of 
Lexington on April 18, 1775. General Gage sent a party of soldiers to 
seize and destroy military stores which 
were being collected at Concord, eighteen 
miles from Boston. The immediate pur- 
pose was accomplished more or less success- 
fully; but the troops were attacked on the 
march by the Massachusetts militia, and 
had sufficiently the worse in the encounter 
to encourage the colonials in the conviction 
that the volunteers could hold their own 
against the regulars. Also it was felt that 
matters had now been fairly brought to the 
arbitrament of the sword. The Massachu- 
setts men began to muster in force, Gage's 
regiments were for the time shut up in 
Boston, and a party of insurgents under 
Ethan Allen captured the fort of Ticon- 

deroga. Before the end of May two thousand men were added to the 
British force in Boston ; and, on the other hand, the Congress at Phila- 
delphia, which was now accepted as the common directing authority of the 
colonists, took measures for raising a force of fifteen thousand men, and 
nominated as commander-in-chief George Washington, a highly respected 
landowner of Virginia, who had served with credit as a young man in 
Braddock's day, and whose force of character had won for him the confi- 
dence of Congress. 

Then on June 17th occurred the first important engagement. An 
American column occupied a height called Breed's Hill (not the neighbour- 
ing Bunker Hill itself) to the north of Boston, from which they could 
command the British quarters. A strong British column only succeeded 




George Washington. 
[After the painting by Trumbull,] 



662 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

in driving them out after being twice repulsed and at the cost of heavy 
losses. The battle of Bunker Hill or Bunker's Hill was in actual fact a 
British victory ; but it was won so hardly and in such circumstances as to 
be a real moral victory for the colonials ; because, on a much larger scale 
than at Lexington, they had faced the regulars and inflicted punishment 
much more severe than they had suffered. 

The colonials were tolerably unanimous in their determination to fight, 
but they were without military discipline, without established organisation, 
badly supplied with stores, and very short of money. The British, on the 
other hand, had complete command of the sea, officers of experience, 
regular troops, and abundant resources. But they remained consistently 
inert, apparently under the conviction that the resistance of the Americans 
would perish of sheer inanition. General Sir William Howe took the 



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place of Gage as commander of the forces ; his brother Admiral Lord 
Howe was in command of the fleet. But the fleet was not allowed to do 
anything, and General Howe preferred to do nothing. His army was con- 
centrated in Boston, while Washington's was concentrated outside. Else- 
where, the governors of the southern colonies had to take refuge in British 
ships, which were unassailable, though in the circumstances useless for 
purposes of offence. Washington spent the winter in a long effort to 
organise and instil discipline into an army which was only held together at 
all with the utmost difficulty. 

Active operations were restricted to an attempt on the part of the 
Americans to attach Canada to the rebellion. The first force of invaders 
led by Montgomery was on the whole favourably received by the French, 
and Montreal was captured. But the most persistent defect of the. American 
armies immediately made itself felt. The men only enlisted for short terms, 
and the moment their time was up they went off home, much after the 



CLEAVAGE 663 

fashion of their Saxon ancestors a thousand years before. Meanwhile 
Benedict Arnold had been despatched against Quebec, where he arrived in 
December with a body of troops ragged, barefoot, half-starved. When the 
remnant from Montreal joined them the whole body barely numbered a 
thousand. Such a force had no possible chance of capturing Quebec. An 
attempt to storm the place was repulsed with heavy loss and Montgomery 
himself was killed. For some three months the besiegers hung on with a 
somewhat fantastic heroism which refused to recognise impossibilities. 
The wavering attitude of the French Canadians turned into one of hostility 
to the Americans, the siege was at last raised in March, and thenceforward 
Canadian loyalty to the Crown was never in doubt. 

On the other hand, in the same month, March, General Howe made up 
his mind that Boston was a bad military centre for his purposes, so he 
put his troops on board ship and sailed for Halifax, which became his 
headquarters for the time. Such was the ignominious position twelve 
months after the outbreak of the war. The British, with complete com- 
mand of the sea, with nothing to check the supply of reinforcements, with 
no foreign complications on hand to distract them, had retired from their 
one real foothold in the thirteen colonies in the face of an untrained army 
which was short of guns and ammunition, and was only preserved from dis- 
solving by the invincible patience and firmness of its great chief ; a chief 
who x was himself the object of the perpetual attacks of jealousy, at the 
same time that the conditions in which he was placed forced upon him a 
rigour of conduct which inevitably made him unpopular, while they pro- 
hibited the active offensive by which popularity might have been won. 
The inefficiency shown by the British administration was almost without 
a parallel except during the first months of the Seven Years' War. The 
government had entered on a battle with the colonists for which the 
only possible justification was an iron resolve to conquer unmistakably 
and decisively. Right or wrong, such a programme would have been in- 
telligible, and there should have been no sort of difficulty in destroying 
open resistance in the field. But no effort was made at conquest, appa- 
rently on the assumption that conquest would come of itself. The actual 
effect was to stiffen in the Americans the conviction that the British might 
be beaten and the determination to beat them. 

Month by month the idea of separation took firmer root ; the 
men who had begun with a conscientious desire to be content with a 
return to the old system were learning to believe that the old system 
had become impossible and that complete separation must be their goal. 
The new feeling at last found decisive expression in the Declaration of 
Independence issued by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. 
Eighteen months earlier Congress had indignantly repudiated the charge 
that independence was desired ; now the claim for independence was 
uncompromisingly asserted. As before, New York was the one state which 
declined to go with the rest. The Declaration, with its accompanying 



664 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

resolutions in favour of seeking foreign alliances, at once and finally put 
reconciliation out of the question. 

It was correctly anticipated that the British would return to the attack 
and would make New York their objective. Thither therefore Washington 
had removed his force after the British evacuation of Boston. At the 
close of June Lord Howe returned with a fleet and occupied Staten Island. 
Some little time elapsed before the resumption of active hostilities ; it 
was occupied in fruitless efforts to arrive at a basis of negotiation, and in 
proclamations on the one side offering free pardon to all who should come 
in and on the other offering grants of land to the German mercenaries 
serving with the British force if they would enroll themselves as American 

citizens. The re- 
newal of fighting at 
the end of August 
soon brought New 
York completely into 
the hands of the 
British, and by the 
end of November 
Washington was 
forced to fall back 
across the Delaware 
River into Pennsyl- 
vania. Sir Guy 
Carleton descended 
from Canada and 
occupied Crown Point near Ticonderoga, while another detachment from 
New York was threatening the New England States. But Howe was 
satisfied with what he had accomplished and relapsed into his normal 
inaction. 

Congress, on the other hand, did something to strengthen Washington's 
hands by ordering the enlistment of the troops for the period of the war, 
instead of for the short terms which had kept the armies in a state of 
perpetually recurring dissolution. Moreover, it declined to listen to the 
chorus of complaints which arose from officers who were jealous of 
Washington and dissatisfied with their own appointments, or which were 
born of a general tendency to depreciate a commander who was admirably 
fulfilling the most thankless of all tasks, that of preserving in being an 
army which was quite unfit to adopt the vigorous offensive which was 
expected of it. Congress retained its confidence in Washington, and 
answered the complaints by enlarging his authority. Washington himself 
found his opportunity that winter, crossed the Delaware on the ice, cut up 
the British outpost at Trenton, and cleared the western part of New Jersey, 
in which he remained established. In the north Carleton was unable to 
make further progress and his command was transferred to Burgoyne. 




ZfCmft 



en 



The first twenty-four signatures to the Declaration that the " United 
Colonies " of America " are, and of right ought to be, Free and 
Independent States." 



CLEAVAGE 665 

No active movements were set on foot until the next midsummer. The 
campaign was designed with the object of cutting off the New England 
States. Burgoyne was to descend with the Northern force along the line 
of the Hudson River, while a column marched from New York to effect a 
junction. Washington's army would then be completely cut off from the 
Northern States, while the British would be able to sweep down upon him 
in irresistible force. It should have been Howe's business to despatch a 
strong column to join hands with Burgoyne, keeping at New York a 
sufficient body to hold Washington himself in check. But instead of 
carrying out this plan he directed his energies to the capture of Philadelphia, 
to which he appears to have attached an extravagant importance. There- 
fore, when Clinton ought to have been marching to join Burgoyne, he was 
detained at New York, whence Howe had carried off the bulk of the 
troops by sea to the Chesapeake to turn Washington's position and fall 
upon Philadelphia. Howe succeeded in his object. He was met by 
Washington at Brandywine Creek, defeated him, occupied Philadelphia, 
and again beat him at German's Town. The American commander had 
to fall back to Valley Forge, where for a long time his position remained 
exceedingly precarious. 

But Howe's move upon Philadelphia ruined the plan of the Northern 
campaign. Clinton could not move to join Burgoyne ; and the Northern 
American army under Gates, reinforced by troops spared at great risk by 
Washington, soon outnumbered Burgoyne's force and manoeuvred him into 
a position at Saratoga, where he found himself with no alternative to the 
surrender of his whole army. Clinton, who had made a struggle to push 
up to his assistance, was obliged to return to New York. The North, instead 
of being secured by the British, was entirely lost to them, and was in the 
hands of the victorious Americans, a matter of more decisive import than 
the occupation of Philadelphia or the difficult situation of George 
Washington's army at Valley Forge. 



in 

FRANCE INTERVENES 

The surrender at Saratoga had results much more far-reaching than the 
mere immediate change in the military situation on the American Continent. 
There was nothing in itself irretrievable about the disaster. A Chatham, 
bent on a vigorous prosecution of the war, would have found troops and 
officers numerous enough and capable enough to vanquish the Americans in 
the field in the simple duel. But after Saratoga the war ceased to be a 
duel. It became a struggle between Great Britain and a group of com- 
batants who joined together for her destruction. She had sown the wind 
in the long years of incompetent and wrong-headed administration ; now she 



666 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

was to reap the whirlwind. The Peace of Paris had left her with no friend 
in Europe and with one implacable foe. That foe, France, had at least 
endeavoured to lay to heart one great lesson of the Seven Years' War, and 
had been steadily and persistently building up a fleet, while Britain had been 
neglecting both her naval and her military organisation. France had been 
drawing closer her union with Spain, and had been mollifying rather than 
exacerbating old animosities on the Continent. She desired nothing better 
than an opportunity of striking a blow at the rival who had defeated her. 

But so far France had had no shadow of excuse for intervention. 
Moreover, at the outset her shrewd minister Turgot had perceived that in 
any event Great Britain was likely to suffer from the war so severely that it 
would not be worth while for France to intervene even if she could afford 
to do so, which Turgot very well knew she could not. French finances 
had been reduced to chaos ; Turgot was striving to bring them into some- 
thing like order, and he knew that economy was imperative. But Turgot's 
tenure of power was brief ; his financial methods subjected the privileged 
classes to taxation, which they resented, and he was driven into retirement. 
The direction of foreign affairs was in the hands of Vergennes. Vergennes 
was inclined to an aggressive policy, although it was restricted to a secret 
encouragement of the American rebellion. International amenities forbade 
the immediate recognition of the American States as an independent 
nation ; but their agents, despatched to Paris after the Declaration of 
Independence, were welcomed by Parisian society, feted, and patronised in a 
fashion which left no room for doubt that participation in the war would be 
exceedingly popular in France. The French court and French society were 
as yet unconscious that they were playing on the crater of a volcano. The 
u rights of a man " were in fashion, because from the point of view of Society 
they were entirely visionary and impossible in France itself. A theoretical 
enthusiasm for popular liberties could be comfortably enjoyed where privi- 
lege felt itself to be perfectly secure. The aristocrats had no suspicion that 
while they were encouraging revolution in America they were fomenting 
revolution at home. 

France indeed could expect no direct benefit to herself from the 
American War ; it was enough that she thirsted for humiliation and disaster 
to fall upon the British. 

But Saratoga gave an opening, an excuse for recognising the indepen- 
dence of the colonies, although it was tolerably obvious that such a 
recognition would involve war. It was not so easy for France to draw 
Spain in her wake ; for Spain was a great colonial power, and if the British 
colonies asserted their independence successfully, it was exceedingly prob- 
able that the Spanish colonies would follow the British example. Still 
Spain might hope that if she joined France and the British colonies in 
open hostilities she might achieve not only the gratification of revenge, 
but tangible results in the recovery of Gibraltar and Minorca. And the 
prospects were infinitely better than they had been when she was last 



CLEAVAGE 667 

tempted to join with France in 1761. Then, Great Britain was advancing 
on the full tide of victory, and her fleets swept the seas unchallenged. Then, 
France was already exhausted by a war in which she had suffered a series 
of disastrous losses, besides being involved in the Prussian complication. 
Now, Britain stood entirely alone, a house divided against itself, engaged in 
a struggle with her own colonies in which it was exceedingly doubtful 
whether she could achieve success, while her fleet had been allowed to 
lose its old predominance, whereas that of France had been carefully nursed 
and expanded. 

It was immediately realised in England that the disaster of Saratoga 
would probably involve her in another struggle for life against the com- 
bined Bourbons. Before the end of the year France had given private 
assurances to the American commissioners in Paris that the independence 
of the colonies would be formally recognised, and that they would receive 
open support ; although it was not till the following March that the formal 
treaty was notified in London. But the facts could not be altogether con- 
cealed, and the threatened danger only roused British doggedness to the 
utmost. Whatever else happened, the Bourbons should be defied and 
fought to the last gasp. King George was even ready to drop the American 
contest altogether in order to concentrate on the French war. Bills were 
introduced and passed to offer the colonists everything that they had 
demanded before the outbreak of the war. North himself urged the king 
to allow him to resign and to call Chatham to the leadership. 

But Chatham's day was over ; even if George could have brought him- 
self to a reconciliation, the thing was no longer possible. He was carried 
down to the House for the last time in order to insist that Britain should 
never consent to a separation, and should never yield to the Bourbons. 
His speech was an answer to the Duke of Richmond's motion, on behalf 
of the Rockinghams, that all fleets and armies should be withdrawn from 
America ; it was a dying effort. His suffering and exhaustion were evident, 
his words often barely audible. Richmond replied. Chatham endeavoured 
once more to rise and speak, but his strength failed him, and he fell back 
in a fit, while a great awe fell upon the House. This was Chatham's last 
utterance, though a month passed before the spirit passed from the worn- 
out frame. So ended the life of the great patriot, whom all men, friends 
and foes alike, recognised as the grandest figure of his time. 

The scene took place on the 7th April, three weeks after the an- 
nouncement of the French treaty. North's proposals had come far too 
late, and Congress refused to treat upon any terms except recognition of 
the complete independence of America. It had already laid before the 
colonies its proposals for a scheme of confederation, which were adopted 
by eight of the states in the following July ; the rest only came in 
by slow degrees. Though the vain attempts at negotiation were not finally 
abandoned until October, the war had already entered upon its second 
phase when the French fleet sailed from Toulon in April. 



668 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

IV 

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE 

The force which had captured Philadelphia remained there through the 
winter, while Washington had the usual difficulty in keeping his troops 
together at Valley Forge. Howe was recalled, and the chief command was 
given to Clinton in New York ; but with the certainty of French interven- 
tion the General could not afford to keep his forces divided. The skill of 
Admiral Howe successfully carried the troops which had occupied Phila- 
delphia back to New York before the superior French fleet arrived in 
American waters. The French admiral, D'Estaing, had accomplished his 
voyage unimpeded. It is very significant of the change which had taken 
place in the naval situation, that, although this fleet from Toulon was larger 
than that under Howe's command, the British fleet in home waters could 
not spare sufficient strength to interfere with it, and was only able to fight 
a drawn battle with a second French fleet, off Ushant, at the end of July. 
The actual preponderance was with the French rather than with the British ; 
it was ultimately to be restored to the British only because of their superior 
seamanship and their superior leading. It may be confidently affirmed 
that if Howe and D'Estaing had changed places the French fleet would 
have reached the mouth of the Hudson before the British fleet had got the 
Philadelphia force back to New York, and New York would have been 
very seriously in danger of falling. 

It is a curious feature of almost all the naval operations throughout the 
war that the French, although habitually in superior force, always avoided 
battle, and missed repeated opportunities of crushing smaller British 
squadrons, while the British commanders were constantly prepared to 
challenge fleets larger than their own. Thus D'Estaing did not venture 
to attack Howe in the Hudson, but drew off to the North, and at the end 
of the year betook himself to the West Indies, which were to be the main 
scene of the operations of the rival fleets. At the same time Clinton had to 
send away a large force from New York to be convoyed by Admiral Hotham 
to Barbadoes. This would still have left the British commander with a 
sufficient force to undertake operations against Washington, since he was 
no longer menaced by a French fleet ; but he was reduced to inaction by 
orders to despatch another body of troops to the southern colonies under 
the command of Cornwallis. Cornwallis was a capable soldier, but he 
could only overrun the country without securing any grip on it, while for 
once Washington passed the winter in - comparative security. In fact, 
when the spring came, his main difficulty lay in restraining Congress from 
insisting on sending another expedition to Canada. Washington at least 
was well aware that the British had blundered in diffusing their energies 



CLEAVAGE 669 

over an extended area, and he had no mind to follow their example. 
Moreover, however useful it might have been at an earlier stage to involve 
Canada in the struggle against Great Britain, now that the Americans were 
fighting in alliance with France he had no inclination to risk making Canada 
the reward of French assistance, and renewing the menace of French rivalry 
which had been removed by the Seven Years' War. 

Neither side then made any material progress in the land operations ; 
for while Clinton could not attack Washington, Washington could not 




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attack him in New York, especially as the absence of D'Estaing still left 
the British in command of the communications by sea. And in the West 
Indies, while the French amused themselves by capturing islands which 
they were perfectly certain to lose again the moment the British should 
acquire a naval predominance, and while for the sake of capturing these 
islands they neglected opportunities of dealing damaging blows to the 
British squadrons, the British commanders directed their captures only to 
points of strategical value, such as Santa Lucia. 

For eighteen months, then, after the French intervention, no striking 
successes fell to either party. On the other hand, in the summer of 1779 



670 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Spain too declared war. Her effective share in the operations was for some 
time limited to the siege of Gibraltar, but the British fleet was now heavily 
outnumbered. There was no British Mediterranean force to raise the 
siege of Gibraltar. The French fleet in the West Indies was larger than 
the British ; a combined Franco-Spanish fleet which made a great naval 
demonstration in the British channel was very much larger than the British 
Channel Fleet for defence, though the enemy were satisfied with demon- 
strating and accomplished nothing further. It was well for the British 
that co-operation between allied navies offers an even more difficult problem 
than co-operation between allied armies. Spain made Gibraltar her objec- 
tive, the French made the West Indies theirs. No attempt was made to 
concentrate for the purpose of crushing the British Navy in detail. 

The result was that by the summer of 1780 the destruction of Great 




Gibraltar before the great siege of 1780. 
[From a print by Coquart ] 

Britain was no nearer. In the northern theatre of war neither Washington 
nor Clinton could attempt a decisive movement. In the southern theatre 
Cornwallis had practically put an end to open resistance, though it was 
clear that upon any withdrawal of forces from that region the insurgents 
would at once take the field again ; but the communication by sea between 
the northern and southern divisions of the British was uninterrupted. Both 
French and British had reinforced the squadrons in the West Indies ; the 
French, commanded by Guichen, was still in greater force, but the British 
Admiral Rodney, on his way out, had thrown reliefs into Gibraltar and 
had caught two Spanish squadrons separately, capturing one and destroy- 
ing the other. In July Washington was reinforced by a strong contingent 
of French troops under Rochambeau and Lafayette. The substantial 
addition to his forces was indubitably of great value to the American 
commander, but did not diminish his personal difficulties, since the 
Americans were exceedingly jealous of the Frenchmen, and all Washington's 
diplomacy was constantly needed to prevent an open rupture. 



CLEAVAGE 671 

During the ensuing twelve months Britain added yet one more to the 
circle of her maritime foes by declaring war upon Holland, because Holland 
joined the Armed Neutrality, a league of the Baltic Powers formed in this 
year to resist the doctrines of international maritime law maintained by 
Great Britain, which turned mainly upon the relative rights of belligerents 
and neutrals. The Dutch, however, being isolated, could not effectively 
co-operate with the other enemies of Great Britain. The main results were 
that Negapatam and Trincomali, two Dutch stations in India and Ceylon, 
passed into the hands of the British, and there was one obstinate sea-fight 
off the Dogger Bank (August 1701), in which British and Dutch fought 
each other with the old grim equality of stubbornness ; but though neither 
side could claim a decisive victory, the Dutch fleet was placed practically 
hors de combat. 

An incident of the autumn was the treason of Benedict Arnold, the 
American commander who had made the desperate attempt to capture 
Quebec in the first year N of the war. His correspondence with Clinton 
was discovered. Arnold made his escape ; but a young British officer, 
Major Andre, who was captured with letters of Arnold concealed on his 
person, was hanged as a spy in strict accordance with military law, and his 
fate aroused such deep public sympathy that a monument was erected to 
his memory in Westminster Abbey, whither his remains were brought for 
burial many years later. But the main importance of the twelve months 
after the midsummer of 1780 lay in the southern theatre, where Corn- 
wallis set out with the object of effecting a junction with the northern 
force. The apparent subjection of the south was illusory. As Cornwallis 
progressed from Georgia through the Carolinas there was a series of 
engagements; Cornwallis was repeatedly in danger of having his com- 
munications with the sea cut off ; as he moved northward, the detachments 
left behind to keep the country under control were cooped up in Savannah, 
Charlestown, and Wilmington; and in August 1781 he was obliged to 
throw himself into Yorktown at the mouth of the Chesapeake. 

Almost immediately there followed the decisive blow, so far as the 
American War was concerned. In April the French Admiral, De Grasse, 
arrived in the West Indies with twenty-one ships of the line. No corre- 
sponding reinforcements came from England, which had been obliged to 
concentrate on the relief of Gibraltar, strenuously blockaded and periodi- 
cally bombarded by the Spaniards. Hitherto the French squadron in the 
North American waters had not been strong enough to sever the communi- 
cations between New York and the South. But now at last the opportunity 
presented itself for crushing one of the two British divisions. By a move- 
ment concerted with De Grasse, Washington, having convinced Clinton 
that he was preparing for a concentrated attack on New York itself, 
suddenly descended instead upon Yorktown. De Grasse sailed in force 
from the West Indies for the Chesapeake, for once with a real justification 
for avoiding an engagement even with an inferior British squadron. The 



672 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

combined French fleet in the Chesapeake greatly outnumbered the 
combined British squadrons, which attacked it but without success ; York- 
town was completely cut off from all assistance, and in October Cornwallis 
was obliged to surrender. With the capture of Yorktown American 
independence was no longer a doubtful issue. The question was rather 
whether Britain herself would survive. If De Grasse had failed to enter 
the Chesapeake it is conceivable that the American army would have broken 
up completely ; for if Yorktown had received the relief which was despatched 
too late from New York, Cornwallis might have inflicted a blow from which 
it would have been extremely difficult to recover. On this single occasion 

it can at least be maintained that the French 
commander was right in staking everything not 
upon the disabling of the enemy's fleet, but on 
securing the immediate capture of a vitally im- 
portant post. The Americans owed their victory 
to his action, though it had become as impos- 
sible for Britain to retain her grip of the colonies 
as it had been in old days for the Plantagenet 
to keep his grip on Scotland. 

But France had not yet paid her share of the 
price for America's victory. The next year, 1782, 
witnessed the final grapple between Britain and 
the Bourbons. In February Minorca was lost ; 
in September a last overwhelming attack was 
planned upon Gibraltar. But the really decisive 
engagement had already been fought in April. 
De Grasse, after leaving Yorktown, had again 
neglected opportunities of bringing the smaller 
British squadrons in the West Indies to an en- 
gagement which ought to have meant their an- 
nihilation. In February Rodney returned thither with a new squadron, 
which gave the British a slight superiority in numbers ; but a Spanish 
fleet was intended to form a junction with De Grasse, and if that junction 
were effected the allied fleet would have more than twice as many ships 
of the line as the British. The British fleet lay at Santa Lucia and 
the French fleet at Martinique, when De Grasse set sail for the point of 
rendezvous in Hayti and Rodney started in pursuit. As the two fleets 
passed Dominica the French admiral again missed an opportunity. It was 
Rodney's business at all costs to prevent the junction ; it was De Grasse's 
business at almost any cost to effect it. The pursuing British van came up 
with the French fleet, while the rear still lay becalmed under the lee of 
Dominica. Apparently De Grasse might have brought his whole fleet to 
bear upon the van, and if he had done so, he having the advantage of the 
wind, the British must have been seriously crippled. He engaged, however, 
with only a part of his fleet in order to ensure the escape of a convoy, and 




An American General. 
[From Barnard's "History," 1790.] 



CLEAVAGE 673 

then proceeded on his way. But four days later the British again caught 
him up before he was clear of the group of islands called The Saints. 
The victory was won by the manoeuvre which is called breaking the line, 
the British ships piercing the French line at two points, throwing it into 
complete disorder, with the rear unable to come to the aid of the van, 
and capturing five ships of the line, including the flagship, which carried 
De Grasse himself. This manoeuvre was not part of Rodney's own plan 
of action, but was a happy inspiration 
due to a change of wind while the two 
fleets were running past each other on 
opposite tacks ; and it is held that if 
Rodney had made full use of his victory 
he ought to have annihilated the French 
fleet. But as it was he made the junc- 
tion with the Spaniards impossible, and 
secured a quite decisive ascendency in 
the West Indian waters. 

In September the last furious attack 
upon Gibraltar was repulsed by the in- 
domitable valour of the besieged, and 
Sir George Elliott's magnificent defence 
was followed by a skilful relief effect by 
Lord Howe. There was no more fear 
that Gibraltar would be taken. There 
remains only one belated phase of the 
war to be dealt with in the account of 
Indian affairs, to which we shall turn 
immediately. 

After the winter of 1781 no one 
in England believed that it would be 
possible to refuse the American demand 
for independence. After Rodney's 

victory in the West Indies, and the demonstration that Gibraltar was im- 
pregnable, the Bourbon Powers could no longer feel any confidence that 
a continuation of the war would bring them any advantage. As for the 
British, they had already suffered so severely that they were ready both to 
concede American independence and to make peace with the Bourbons 
upon honourable terms. The preliminaries of peace were agreed upon by 
all the parties at the beginning of 1783, though the definitive Treaty of 
Versailles was not signed till the following September. The conclusion of 
the war brought no very serious changes other than the separation of the 
thirteen colonies from the mother country and their formation into the 
United States. In effect there was a general restoration of conquests, 
except for the retention of Minorca and Florida by Spain. 




Admiral Sir George Rodney. 
[From the portrait by Reynolds.] 



2 U 



674 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

V 
WARREN HASTINGS IN INDIA 

While King George's government was forcing on the rupture with the 
colonies in America, while the British nation was fighting its own offspring, 
and losing the major portion of its empire in the Western Hemisphere, 
and finally was struggling desperately to preserve its own existence as the 
premier maritime Power, events of hardly less importance were fixing firmly 
the foundations of British dominion in India. Almost Warren Hastings 
might have said, " Alone I did it." The achievement was his, for almost 
without exception his colleagues thwarted and counteracted him at every 
turn, and half of the difficulties which were not imposed upon him by 
their actual malice were the outcome of the blundering stupidity of 
authorities who acted without reference to him. He had no voice in the 
selection of the colleagues or the authorities who thwarted him. The 
directors from home sent him admirable moral instructions, but instead 
of providing means for carrying them out, clamoured for handsome profits. 
He was forced into wars with the country powers, while his own country 
could spare neither ships nor troops to help him. And in the face of these 
enormous difficulties he preserved the British power and left it on a footing 
which enabled his successors to secure a decisive ascendency. 

Clive did much to reduce the evils which had followed naturally upon 
the sudden acquisition of a vast irresponsible power by a trading company. 
But he could not create an imperial system single-handed. The company's 
servants still evaded their responsibilities, still utilised their opportunities to 
make improper profits, and still neglected to make it their first aim to learn 
how the new territories ought to be governed. There w T as still no central 
British authority in India. The three Presidencies of Madras, Bengal, and 
Bombay were governed each by its own governor and council, and by land 
no one of them could even communicate with another except across 
Maratha territory. 

In 1772 Warren Hastings, then acting as second official in Madras, was 
made Governor of Bengal, where before Clive's last visit to India he had 
been honourably distinguished by his efforts to support Vansittart in check- 
ing the general misrule. It was not till two years later that the Governor 
of Bengal was elevated into the position of Governor-General of the British 
dominions in India. An account of the career of Warren Hastings must 
still to a very large extent take the form of a defence, because the literary 
forces which were arrayed to denounce him during the best part of a 
century were so powerful and were applied with such picturesque effect as 
to produce the almost indelible but exceedingly misleading impression of an 



CLEAVAGE 675 

able but unscrupulous and tyrannical governor, who achieved his ends very 
largely by grossly iniquitous methods. 

The first instance is that of the Rohilla war which took place while he 
was only Governor of Bengal. Macaulay's exceedingly picturesque account, 
given in his essay on Warren Hastings, is a quite astonishing distortion of 
demonstrable truth. Just before the outbreak of hostilities between French 
and British, about the time when Nadir Shah swept over the north-west of 
India and sacked Delhi, a band of Mohammedan Afghans called the Rohillas 
made themselves masters of the territory lying on the north-western frontier 
of the province of Oudh. In 1770 some forty thousand Rohillas domi- 
nated the very much larger Hindu population in occupation of the soil. 
They were lords there by right of conquest and nothing else ; they had 
been there for considerably less than half a century. They were a fighting 
race, and they rendered considerable service to Ahmed Shah when he smote 
the Marathas at Paniput. The Marathas wanted to punish them ; they 
appealed to the wazir of \Dudh for defence against the Marathas, and the 
wazir, counting them a valuable buffer against Maratha aggression, promised 
to defend them in consideration of a large indemnity. 

The Rohillas did not pay the indemnity, and the wazir believed, or 
pretended to believe, that they were arranging a compact with the Marathas 
for the partition of Oudh. He put the case to Hastings that the expulsion 
of the Rohillas and the annexation of Rohilkhand to Oudh were necessary 
for the preservation of Oudh against an alliance between Marathas and 
Rohillas. And he invited Hastings to participate by lending him troops, 
for which assistance substantial payment would be made. The preserva- 
tion of Oudh was an essential feature of the policy laid down by Clive and 
adopted by Hastings, who acceded to Shujah Daulah's proposals and sent 
a force to help in the suppression of the Rohillas. Experience had not yet 
taught the necessity of stipulating that British assistance should not be 
given unless the operations of war were carried on under British control. 
The wazir conducted the war upon oriental principles, in spite of protests 
from the British commander ; but the suggestion that Hastings lent himself 
to an act of wanton aggression by a greedy and cruel potentate against an 
idyllic community for the sake of a bribe is preposterously remote from the 
fact. 

Meanwhile, Government at home had awakened to the fact that the 
British nation must accept some share of responsibility for the govern- 
ment of India. A commission of inquiry gave an opening for a virulent 
attack upon Clive in parliament, but, to the credit of the country, the House 
rejected a proposed vote of censure, and affirmed instead that Clive had 
rendered great services to the state. But while parliament exonerated the 
man to whom the country owed so much, it applied itself also to a singular 
experiment in constitution making. It devised for India the system of 
Lord North's -Regulating Act. The Governor of Bengal was to be Governor- 
General of India ; the governors of the other two Presidencies being sub- 



676 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

ordinate. But he was to have a nominated council consisting of four 
members besides himself. The votes of the five members of council were 
of equal force, the Governor-General having a casting vote only when the 
voting was otherwise equal. Also there was to be a High Court of Justice 
consisting of four judges, who were to be responsible not to the Govern- 
ment of India but to the Crown. Three members of the new council were 
sent out from England, who apparently regarded themselves as a com- 
mittee appointed for the express purpose of overriding the will of the 
Governor-General in every particular. It would hardly have been possible 
to devise a scheme more hopelessly impracticable. Moreover, the Govern- 
ment of India was itself in the long run responsible to the management 
of the East India Company in London, which was vested in two bodies, 
the court of directors and the court of proprietors or large shareholders. 

From the time of their arrival in India at the end of 1774 the three 
members of the council, Francis, Clavering, and Monson, commonly known 
as the Triumvirate, set themselves to reverse whatever could be reversed in 
the past doings of Hastings, and to thwart his actions in the present. To 
this strife between the Governor-General and his council belongs an incident 
too notorious to be passed over. The Triumvirate deliberately set them- 
selves to procure evidence which could be used for a formal attack upon 
Hastings. An instrument upon whom they relied was a high-caste 
Brahmin, Nanda Kumar, whose name has been popularised as Nuncomar. 
Nuncomar was an adept at the fabrication of evidence, and Hastings was 
preparing to indict him for conspiracy when he was relieved from the 
necessity for further action. The new High Court of Justice presented an 
opportunity to an old enemy of Nuncomar, one Mohun Persad, who charged 
him before the court with forgery. The court administered English law, 
and forgery under English law was a capital offence. The court, after a 
long and entirely fair examination, found Nuncomar guilty and condemned 
him to death. They could have done nothing else. But the incident has 
been ingeniously perverted so as to represent Sir Elijah Impey, the Chief 
Justice, as a kind of Judge Jeffreys, and the trial itself as in effect a conspiracy 
for the protection of Hastings and the destruction of Nuncomar. It would 
be nearer the truth to say that a conspiracy against Hastings was thwarted 
by the fortunate accident that Nuncomar had exposed himself to destruc- 
tion at the hands of a private enemy. 

Meanwhile, however, Bombay had chosen to assert itself, with dis- 
astrous results. A posthumous child was born to the late peishwa of 
Puna. But before the child's birth the functions of the peishwaship were 
discharged by a kinsman, Ragonath Rao, or Ragoba, who wished to remain 
peishwa ; but the adherents of the infant were too strong for him. The 
other chiefs of the Maratha confederacy, Sindhia, Holkar, the Gaekwar and 
the Bhonsla (three of these titles are born by hereditary princes to the 
present day), were in no haste to commit themselves. Ragoba appealed to 
the authorities at Bombay to support his cause, for which support they 



INDIA 



itish Dominion as 

by Warren Hastings 




SO 100 ZOO 300 400 



India and the British Dominion in 1785. 

677 



678 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

demanded, and were promised as their price, the ports of Salsette and 
Bassein. The Bombay governor had no power to conclude such a treaty, 
since Hastings was already Governor-General. Hastings was entirely 
averse from superfluous meddling in native politics. But the Bombay 
authorities proceeded to active hostilities on behalf of Ragoba before there 
was time to stop them. Hastings felt that in the circumstances withdrawal 
was impossible. But the Triumvirate overrode Hastings, and negotiated 
a treaty with the regency acting for the infant peishwa at Puna. But then 
came the news that a French adventurer had arrived at Puna, while the 
intervention of France in the American War just at this time pointed to a 
serious danger of the revival of the French question in India. The Trium- 
virate at Calcutta had been broken up by the deaths of Monson and Claver- 
ing. With his hands thus freed, therefore, Hastings designed to co-operate 
with Bombay again in making Ragoba peishwa. Bombay did not wait to 
co-operate, but blundered into disaster in a hurry ; only the brilliant march 
across India of a small force despatched by Hastings under Captain 
Goddard saved Bombay from an altogether ignominious collapse. Negotia- 
tions with the different Maratha chiefs, all of whom played fast and loose 
with each other and with the British, occupied the eighteen months follow- 
ing Goddard's arrival in the West — varied with occasional skirmishes. 

Meanwhile, Madras had not been idle in the work of mischief-making. 
The authorities there had in 1773 made a present of Tanjur, which was 
not theirs to give, to the Nawab of the Carnatic, ostensibly because it 
would be inconvenient if Tanjur happened to turn hostile, actually because 
the Nawab of Arcot was heavily in debt to various servants of the company, 
and the possession of Tanjur might help him to pay a dividend. Then, after 
the Madras council had arrested and imprisoned the exceedingly arbitrary 
Governor Pigott, who had been sent out to try to restore order, the 
authorities proceeded to alarm the Nizam by proposing to cancel in the 
existing treaties with him such details as were inconvenient to them. As 
this was just at the time when Bombay had plunged itself into its worst 
difficulties, the Nizam thought the moment opportune for forming an anti- 
British coalition with the Marathas and Haidar Ali of Mysore, and perhaps 
with the French at Mauritius. 

Now for the past ten years Haidar, a born captain, had been organising 
in Mysore an army more powerful than had been wielded by any potentate 
since the death of Aurangzib. He was much too shrewd to be in a hurry 
to quarrel with the British, with whom he would have preferred an alliance ; 
but the conduct of the Madras authorities was not encouraging. Then 
came the declaration of war between Britain and France ; Haidar opened 
communications with Mauritius. Hastings, as a matter of course, issued 
from Calcutta orders for the seizure of the French factories. The French 
port of Mahe' on the west coast could not be attacked without violating 
Haidar's territory, nevertheless the British seized it without reference to 
him. This was the last straw; and suddenly in July 1780 Haidar Ali 



CLEAVAGE 679 

swept down from Mysore into the Carnatic with a hundred tnousand men, 
ravaged the whole country, cut up one British detachment, and swept all the 
whites into Madras. 

It was fortunate that the native powers were incapable of making common 
cause for any long time. The Nizam at once became more afraid of Haidar 
than of the British. The Maratha chiefs were playing each one for his 
own hand. At the moment Sindhia and Holkar were on the side of the 
Puna regency ; the Gaekwar and the Bhonsla, the most westerly and the 
most easterly of the confederacy, were keeping aloof. In August, while 
Haidar was ravaging the Carnatic, a small British force under Popham and 
Bruce, which had been detached to Sindhia's territory, completely restored 
the prestige of British arms by surprising and capturing that prince's head- 
quarters, the rock fortress of Gwalior, which was supposed to be impregnable. 
Sindhia, who had been acting farther south in conjunction with Holkar, 
was at once drawn back to take care of his own territories, the Gaekwar 
and the Bhonsla decided to do nothing, and Sindhia, finding that Holkar 
was gaining credit at his expense, began to reconsider the position. Thus 
the opportune capture of Gwalior had the practical effect of preventing any 
other power from co-operating with Haidar, and of leaving Hastings free 
to concentrate almost exclusively upon the defence of the Carnatic. Eyre 
Coote was despatched thither from Calcutta, and although he was grievously 
hampered by the mismanagement of the Madras government, he routed 
Haidar's forces three times during the summer of 1781. It was just after 
this that the declaration of war between Britain and Holland led to the 
capture of Negapatam and Trincomali. 

The close of 17 81, however, was the lowest moment of the British 
fortunes. Yorktown fell, Britain had lost her naval supremacy, and the 
ablest, perhaps, of all French admirals, Suffren, was making for the Indian 
Seas. Still the obstinate valour of the British commander Hughes and his 
subordinates, displayed during 1782 in a series of engagements none of 
which could be definitely described as a victory for either side, prevented the 
brilliant abilities of the French admiral from effecting anything of a decisive 
character. The old Sultan of Mysore — he was eighty years of age — died, 
and was succeeded by his much less capable if equally ambitious son Tippu 
Sahib or Tippu Sultan ; and in the following year, just as it seemed that 
the decisive struggle was on the point of taking place, the news came that 
the peace preliminaries had been signed between France and Great Britain. 
The Madras government, in defiance of Hastings, stopped the operations 
against Tippu and made peace with him on terms which he was able to 
represent as having been dictated by himself as victor. Hostilities with the 
Marathas had ceased some time earlier. 

Hastings had not desired or aimed at any extension of British territory, 
and the only actual addition made under him to the British dominion was 
that of the district of Benares, ceded by Oudh in return for British support. 
But it was his vigour and audacity which enabled Goddard and Popham to 



68o THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

neutralise the blunders of Bombay, and permitted Eyre Coote to retrieve 
the position in the Carnatic which had been so terribly jeopardised by the 
government of Madras. It was the diplomacy of Hastings which severed 
the Gaekwar and the Bhonsla from the Maratha confederacy, and impressed 
upon the particularly intelligent Sindhia the wisdom of avoiding an irrecon- 
cilable breach with the British. Happily, during the greater part of these 
complications with the country powers Hastings had very nearly a free 
hand, because of the disappearance of the cabal against him in his own 
council ; though at the last he again lost some of his freedom of action, 
because the cabal against him in England, reinforced by Sir Philip Francis, 
was in the ascendant. Bat we have still to give attention to some other 
aspects of his rule in Bengal itself and with relation to Oudh. 

These are affairs of which the most conspicuous belong rather to the 
province of the biographer rather than of the historian, since they did not 
permanently affect the position of the British, whereas they were utilised 
as leading features in indictments against the Governor-General. Still they 
cannot be passed over. The first of these is the suppression of Cheyte 
Singh, the Rajah of Benares. 

When Shujah Daulah, the Oudh wazir, died, he was succeeded by his 
son, Asaf ud-Daulah. The Triumvirate, newly arrived in India, made ex- 
ceedingly heavy demands on the new wazir, insisting on an increase of the 
subsidies granted by his father for the maintenance of troops under British 
control in Oudh. They required also for the same purpose the cession 
of the district of Benares, and at the same time they caused very serious 
embarrassment to the wazir by guaranteeing to the royal ladies or Begums, 
his mother and grandmother, a quantity of treasure left by the old wazir, 
as well as sundry very rich estates which ought in the natural course to 
have supplied the wazir's exchequer. 

Now the title of Rajah, which had been conferred upon Cheyte Singh's 
father by the Oudh wazir, has no very precise translation. A rajah might 
be an independent monarch, or he might be merely a big landowner or 
zemindar, whose title meant less than that of an earl in England. Cheyte 
Singh, in short, was a vassal of the wazir of Oudh, who, by the transfer of 
Benares to the British, became a vassal of the British. He had paid a 
tribute to the wazir, and that tribute was now due to the British. When 
the Maratha war increased the Bengal exchequer's chronic need of money, 
Hastings demanded an increase of tribute from Benares. Such demands 
were a normal part of the oriental system ; if the overlord could enforce 
them, they were paid ; if he could not, they were not paid. Cheyte Singh 
tried to evade payment ; Hastings imposed a fine by way of penalty. Still 
the rajah evaded payment. Hastings went to Benares with a very small 
escort and arrested him ; the population rose, and Hastings was in no little 
personal danger. Nevertheless the revolt was very promptly suppressed ; 
the rajah was deposed, and Benares was forfeited to the company. The 
fines imposed were heavy enough to be called vindictive, though in no way 



CLEAVAGE 68 1 

contrary to oriental precedent; but Hastings had the excuse that Cheyte 
Singh was under very strong suspicion of treasonable correspondence with 
Haidar Ali, or at least of taking advantage of Haidar Ali's hostility to the 
British to seek his own liberation from his British overlords. The most 
serious interpretation of Hastings's action was that he deliberately intended 
to goad Cheyte Singh into revolt in order to have an excuse for forfeiting 
Benares ; but that view is hardly warranted by the facts. 

Next comes the affair of the Oudh Begums. Asaf ud-Daulah, having 
his revenues seriously curtailed as compared with those of his father by the 
action of the Bengal government controlled by 
the Triumvirate, failed to meet his obligations. 
The Bengal government threatened him, where- 
upon he pointed out that he would have been able 
to meet his obligations if the British had not 
guaranteed to the Begums the treasure which 
ought to have been at his disposal. That guarantee 
had been given by the vote of the majority of the 
council, in flat defiance of the Governor-General. 
But the Triumvirate was now dissolved, and 
Hastings considered himself at liberty to withdraw 
the guarantee. Moreover, there was again the ex- 
cuse that the Begums were more than suspected of 
having encouraged and supported Cheyte Singh. 
Hastings cancelled the guarantee ; the wazir pro- 
ceeded to make seizure of the treasure ; the Begums 
resisted, and were declared to be in a state of re- Asaf ud . Daulah} Wazir of 0ud h, 
belhon, which justified his intervention. With the [From a contemp?rary painting by 
help of the British, the wazir had no difficulty in 
enforcing his claims ; but, as in the case of the 
Rohillas, no proper steps were taken to prevent him from adopting oriental 
methods in the treatment of the Begums and their supporters, although 
ultimately the Begums were placed upon a fairly liberal allowance. There 
is no possible doubt that in both these cases Hastings was actuated by 
the pressing need of replenishing the exchequer, and that a severity was 
exercised for which only extreme need could furnish a plausible excuse. 
But indubitably the extreme need was there, and, judged by native 
standards and native' practice, the Governor-General's action was a mere 
matter of course. 

A third matter which has been employed to blacken the fair fame not 
so much of Hastings as of Chief Justice Impey is the contest between the 
supreme court and the council, and the compromise by which it was 
terminated. We have seen that the judges sent out from England claimed 
to be responsible only to the Crown, not to the council in India or to the 
directors and proprietors at home. They seem to have regarded it as 
their special function to call government officials to account. The com- 




SSPS^ 



Vi:^*§22r 



Home belonging to the Royal 
Asiatic Society.] 



682 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

pany's officers were perpetually haled before the court sitting at Calcutta 
by every one with a grievance real or fictitious, until the administration 
was brought almost to a standstill. At length the council, who had 
control of the troops, were driven to ordering the orders of the courts 
to be ignored. Such a state of things could not be allowed to continue. 
Hastings had no wish to rob the supreme court of legitimate authority, but 
an authority which endeavoured to override the Government itself could not 
be regarded as legitimate. As matters stood, the ordinary jurisdiction in the 
country for criminal cases was in the hands of the nawab's officials, while 

the fiscal and civil jurisdictions were in 
the hands of the company's revenue 
officers, the fiscal questions being those 
of primary importance. Hastings sepa- 
rated the civil and fiscal courts, and con- 
stituted a court of appeal in Calcutta ; 
and he offered the presidency of this 
court of appeal to Impey as an officer 
of the company. By this means the 
practical supervision of legal administra- 
tion was put in the hands of the Chief 
Justice, although, acting as an officer of 
the company, he was, in that position, re- 
sponsible to the council. The compro- 
mise was a perfectly reasonable method 
of getting rid of a hopeless deadlock. 
Macaulay has succeeded in translating 
the transaction into a huge piece of cor- 
ruption on the part of Impey, because 
a substantial salary was attached to his 
new position ; but in fact it was only by the expedient of enabling him 
to exercise supervisory functions as a servant of the company that he 
could be freed from the necessity of exercising them as an independent 
authority, and he could not exercise them as an independent authority 
without coming into collision with the council. The arrangement was a 
modus vivendi which required sanction from home to be rendered per- 
manent, and the purpose in view was substantially achieved. Impey, 
however, was consistently a supporter of Hastings, and consequently 
his conduct, like that of Hastings himself, was habitually distorted and 
misrepresented by the cabal in England, whose presentation of the case 
against Hastings generally won public z xeptance until the investigations 
of a later age revealed their injustice. 




Warren Hastings. 
[After the portrait by Lawrence. ] 



CLEAVAGE 



683 



VI 



NORTH, THE WHIGS, AND THE YOUNGER PITT 



Lord North held office from 1770 till March 1782. Throughout that 
time the king was supreme. North did his bidding, often very much 
against his own will ; and at the general elections which took place the 
ministry always retained 



thesupportof thecountry. 
That support had been 
won by the Crown's ap- 
propriation of the old 
methods by which Wal- 
pole and Newcastle had 
procured their majorities. 
Public money, patronage 
carried through every de- 
partment, the distribution 
of sinecures, the ejection 
of political opponents 
from every kind of office 
in civil, military, and 
naval administration, se- 
cured the subserviency of 
parliament and the votes 
of the electorate. The 
system broke down in the 
long run because it pro- 
duced an inefficiency so 
intolerable that the king 
was obliged to place him- 
self in the hands of ministers who declined to look upon obedience to 
the Crown as their first duty. After an interval he found a minister of a 
very different type from Lord North, with whom he could work in harmony 
but whom he could not dominate. He retained enough of his personal 
power to be able in one critical case to override that minister's will 
with disastrous results ; but the new royal supremacy which operated 
during Lord North's twelve years was a proved failure and was not again 
revived. 

The North administration, destructive from an imperial point of view, 
was almost barren in domestic affairs. One measure for the relief of Roman 
Catholics in 1778 stand to its credit. Their disabilities in the inheritance 
and purchase of land were abolished, and the celebration of the Roman 



t •' 




Km 

Will! 






Wl^ii 



Lord North. 



684 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Catholic rites ceased to be a penal offence in England. Nevertheless, the 
proposal of a similar measure for Scotland was received in that country 
with such an outburst of fanatical wrath that it had to be dropped. Even 
in England it was possible to work up the " No Popery " agitation to such 
a pitch that in 1780 the half-crazed Lord George Gordon stirred up a 
frenzy of rioting which the most disorderly elements of the com- 
munity turned to their own account. Prisons were broken open, much 
damage was done, and the disturbances were only suppressed when the king 
himself assumed the responsibility of which ministers were afraid and 
ordered out the military to deal with the rioters. 

The corruption of the existing system was brought home to the Whigs 
when they found it employed against them instead of in the interests of the 
great Whig families. The North administration began to totter at the end 
of 1777. North himself would willingly have given place to Chatham, but 
Chatham died ; the only alternative to North was a Rockingham adminis- 
tration, and North held on. The Whigs directed their attacks against the 
system which excluded them from office ; Burke brought in a bill for 
" Economic Reform," which meant mainly the abolition of sinecures and of 
the expenditure of public money as a means of corruption. But when it 
came to details so many private interests were touched that the bill failed. 
Chatham himself, at an earlier stage, had desired a parliamentary reform 
which would have abolished the pocket boroughs, and would to a consider- 
able extent have anticipated the great Reform Bill which was passed in 
1832. But both the king and the Whigs relied too much on the manipula- 
tion of pocket boroughs to approve of such a plan. The most notable 
outcome in parliament of the attack upon the prevailing system was the 
passing in 1780 of Dunning's famous resolution that "The power of the 
Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." 

The disasters of the war, however, culminating in the surrender at 
Yorktown, made it impossible for the king to maintain his resistance to 
North's resignation. In March 1782 Rockingham accepted the task of 
forming an administration, prominent in which were Lord Shelburne, who 
represented Chatham's personal followers, and Charles James Fox, the son 
of Chatham's ancient rival, who at a very early stage had identified himself 
with the most extreme section of those Whigs who advocated the colonial 
cause in the most uncompromising fashion as the cause of political liberty. 
Burke, by far the greatest man among the Whigs, was not regarded as a 
practical parliamentarian and was given only a minor office. William Pitt, 
the younger son of Lord Chatham, who had already astonished the House 
by his precocious talents, declined, though he was only two and twenty, to 
join the ministry in a subordinate position. Three months later Rocking- 
ham died. Shelburne, by the king's choice, became the head of the ministry, 
and Fox resigned, being followed into opposition by Burke and some others 
who were personally hostile to Shelburne, who, in his turn, was the minister 
most in personal accord with the king, with the exception of the Lord 



CLEAVAGE 685 

Chancellor Thurlow, the one survivor from North's cabinet. Young Pitt 
took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

The Shelburne ministry was divided by distrust ; its main business was 
the settlement of the terms of peace. Fox with his followers, and North 
with his followers, joined in attacking the Government, which was deserted 
by one after another of its members. In February 1783 the two leaders 
of the Opposition formed an open coalition. Such a junction of opposites 
was without parallel, but it was decisive. Shelburne resigned ; and after 
some weeks of despairing efforts to procure a ministry to his liking, George 
was obliged to surrender to the coalition. The Treasury was given to 
Portland as the nominal head of the administration, while Fox and North 
became Secretaries of 
State. Pitt at an earlier 
stage had rejected over- 
tures from Fox, which 
would have involved what 
he regarded as the betrayal 
of Shelburne ; and he de- 
clined absolutely to be as- 
sociated with North. 

The coalition was the 
most extraordinary on re- 
cord. For twelve years 
North had represented the 
principle of complete sub- 
serviency to the king and 
of an uncompromising resistance to the claims of the colonies. Fox 
had advocated the cause of the colonies with a vehemence which verged 
upon treason, and had denounced the power of the Crown in unmeasured 
terms. There was no single point on which a positive agreement between 
the two could have been anticipated. A coalition between Shelburne and 
either Fox or North would have involved very much less strain than the 
coalition of 1757 between the elder Pitt and Newcastle. But that com- 
bination had been possible for the simple reason that every one concerned 
saw that nothing else could save the country from immediate ruin. The 
coalition of 1783 had no principles and apparently but one object, the 
exclusion of Shelburne. To that end, North consented that the Crown 
should be treated with respect but not with deference ; and the two groups 
hitherto hostile presented for the time being a united front. 

Shelburne being out, the coalition found no further need for demanding 
material modifications in the peace preliminaries which they had first con- 
demned. Their Treaty of Versailles, signed in September, made no changes 
of consequence. The next question of the hour therefore was that of the 
government of India ; and this during the last twenty years had come to 
be complicated by the presence in England of increasing numbers of the 




" England Made Odious, or the French Dressers. 

[A caricature on Shelburne and Fox at the time of the arrangement of the 
Treaty of Versailles. ] 



686 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

"Nabobs" — men who had amassed great wealth in India, especially under 
the conditions prevailing before Lord North's Regulating Act. They were 
courted by the politicians ; they were often large shareholders in the East 
India Company ; they liked to feel themselves to be persons of importance 
and of influence ; and they regarded patronage in India as to a great extent 
a perquisite of their own. The course of events in India had been very 
little understood by the public at large, and even those who, like Edmund 
Burke, had interested themselves in it honestly and deeply, had been led 
astray as to the actual facts by the misrepresentations of Francis and his 
friends. The House of Commons and the court of directors were both 
strongly biased against Hastings, who was preposterously blamed for not 
having prevented the blunders of the Madras and Bombay governments ; 
and the Governor-General would have been recalled at an earlier date, but 
for the persistent confidence in him of the court of proprietors with which 
lay the final control of the new appointments under the Regulating Act. 

Fox, then, introduced a bill for the better government of India. The 
political direction from London was to be withdrawn from the courts of 
directors and proprietors, and vested in a body of seven commissioners 
appointed by parliament for four years. Absolute control of policy and 
patronage was to be in the hands of the commissioners ; vacancies in their 
number were to be filled by nominees of the Crown, A second body of 
commissioners, chosen by parliament from among the proprietors, was to 
control commerce, the vacancies among its nine members being filled by 
the court of proprietors. 

The scheme at once aroused the hostility of the whole commercial com- 
munity as being an abrogation of the East Indian Company's charter, and 
destructive of the position of all chartered companies. Politically it was 
resented as placing the whole of the Indian patronage virtually in the 
hands of the present majority in the House of Commons, who would 
thereby be enabled to secure the solid support of the nabobs at home, 
and therewith, as it was argued, a control of the electorate which would 
secure that majority permanently in power. The king saw in the bill 
the death-blow of the royal authority ; the Opposition saw in it the death- 
blow of electoral liberty ; and the mercantile community felt that their 
interests as a body were jeopardised by the violation of the East India 
Company's charter. 

But the coalition had an overwhelming preponderance in the House 
of Commons. The bill was carried in that chamber by a large majority. 
The vote of the House of Lords was uncertain, but was decided by the 
action of the king, who made it known that he would treat the voting 
upon it as a personal matter. This turned the scale with many of those 
peers who in the past had been associated with North. The peers rejected 
the bill. The Government carried in the Commons a vote of censure 
on the unconstitutional intervention of the Crown. George dismissed the 
ministers, and Pitt accepted appointment as First Lord of the Treasury. 



CLEAVAGE 687 

The obvious course for the dismissed ministers was to demand a dissolution. 
The rejection of a bill passed by a large majority in the House of Commons 
had been procured in the House of Lords by the king's unconstitutional 
interference. An appeal to the country on that issue would have given 
them an almost irresistible case, and the appeal could hardly have been 
refused. But they did not want a dissolution. They imagined that they 
could force the young minister to resign, and George to recall them to 
office, without risking an election which might weaken their preponderance 
because of the unpopularity of the India Bill. Thus they delivered them- 
selves into Pitt's hands. Practically single-handed he fought from day 
to day in the House of Commons against the most famous orators and 
debaters of the time, and day by day the tide of his popularity rose 
in the country. The Opposition had dropped the constitutional issue 
which was their most valuable asset, and had made Pitt a present of 
a new one by claiming the right to force themselves upon the king, to 
dictate to him the choice M}f ministers, without an appeal to the country. 
And day by day the India Bill became more and more unpopular. At 
last Pitt felt that his moment had come ; Parliament was dissolved in 
March, a mere remnant of the coalition were able to retain their seats, 
and Pitt came back to parliament with a record majority at his back. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

I 

IRELAND 

The eighteenth century had still some years to run when the destinies of 
the British Empire were committed to the guidance of William Pitt the 
Younger. But at this point a new era was dawning, an era of convulsion 
and revolution, political, social, and intellectual. The characteristic move- 
ments associated with the century had run their course, and if " The 
Eighteenth Century " is a somewhat inaccurate title for a chapter reviewing 
aspects of the period which have been left apart for continuous treatment, 
it is still more nearly appropriate than any other. Of these deferred subjects 
the first place is claimed by Ireland, which at the end of the period had 
acquired a greater political prominence than it had known since the six- 
teenth century, and had begun to assert as it had never done before a 
political nationality. 

The triumph of the Revolution of 1688 had meant in Ireland a com- 
plete ascendency of one-fifth of the population over the rest, and at the 
same time the subordination of that ruling Protestant minority to England, 
or, after the union of England and Scotland, to Great Britain. The 
Protestant alone had political rights, a voice in the parliament, a hand in 
the administration, a right to bear arms, to practise his religion freely, to 
educate his children in his own faith, to accumulate landed property. Even 
the inheritance of land was denied to the Roman Catholic whose brother 
was a Protestant. The political disabilities of the Romanist were partly 
shared by the Protestant dissenter. 

The Protestant ascendency was bound up with the Hanoverian succession. 
Protestant loyalty therefore was assured ; and the Protestants could not 
have ventured upon any serious protest against the political subjection to 
the authority on the other side of St. George's Channel, even if their 
political aspirations had been active enough to make them desire to do so. 
Not only did they differ in faith from the great bulk of the population, 
but they were also to a large extent aliens, descendants of Scots or English 
who had dispossessed the old proprietors. Their very existence depended, 
or seemed to depend, upon an ascendency which could only be maintained 

688 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 689 

by the sanction of force, and that sanction would disappear if they quarrelled 
with the English government. 

But Protestants as well as Catholics suffered from the economic 
conditions. Virtually the only industries permitted by the English com- 
mercial laws were the cultivation of the soil and the linen manufacture ; 
even the export of wool was prohibited. And if the Protestants had the 
administration and the legislature to themselves, the powers of the latter 
were exceedingly limited. A bill could be initiated only by the Privy 
Council, and before it was passed by the Irish parliament it had to 
be submitted to the English Privy Council, which might simply suppress it. 
Any amendments or alterations inserted by that body became substantive 
parts of the bill, which was then presented for acceptance or rejection as it 
stood by the Irish parliament. During the reign of George I. a Declaratory 
Act was passed in the British parliament which asserted the right of that 
body to legislate for Ireland on its own account without reference to the 
Irish parliament at all. N 

Still, during the first half of the century, Ireland lay almost inert, in a 
helpless bondage, although Jonathan Swift denounced the whole system 
with scathing satire. There was no organised effort on the part of the 
depressed majority to claim the rights of citizenship, or on the part of the 
dominant minority to assert an equality of citizenship with English and 
Scots. It was not till George III. was already seated on the throne that 
the revival of political aspirations and political activity began to make itself 
decisively felt. 

At no time in their history have the Irish people been possessed with 
the spirit of legality which is so notable a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon ; 
and one at least of the causes for this is to be found in the fact that the 
law has been for them at all times something imposed upon them from 
outside by an alien conqueror, not, as with the Anglo-Saxon, a system 
evolved by natural development out of their own racial institutions. The 
Anglo-Saxon appeals to the law instinctively for protection from tyranny ; 
to the Irishmen the law presented itself as sanctioning and supporting 
tyranny. If he suffered he did not appeal to that law for protection, but 
set the law itself at defiance and became a law unto himself, which is an 
attitude altogether unintelligible to the mind of the Anglo-Saxon, for whom, 
as for the Romans, the great imperial race of the ancient world, the sanctity 
of the law dominates all other considerations. In the eighteenth century 
the rural population found themselves oppressed by the law ; and the first 
breaking up of their inertia took the form of fighting the law ; not of seek- 
ing its amendment, which appeared to be a hopeless endeavour. The Irish 
peasant felt the pinch of oppression in the relations between landlord and 
tenant which were founded in the Protestant ascendency and aggravated by 
absenteeism. The peasant began to fight the law by the formation of 
secret societies which exercised a counter-tyranny through the cruel outrages 
commonly resorted to by weakness which recognises no law. These 

2 x 



690 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

societies, " Whiteboys " and others, were exclusively agrarian and, at least 
to begin with, were neither religious nor political. If most of the landed 
proprietors were Protestant, there were districts also where there were 
many Protestants among the tenantry, so that the antagonism of classes was 
not exclusively an antagonism of religions. 

At the same time the political instincts of the dominant class were 
awakening. What may be called a national party, a body which was 
discontented with the subordination of Ireland to Great Britain, a body 
which claimed that the legislature should do something more than register 
the decrees of the parliament at Westminster and of the British Privy 
Council, was coming into being. Its first demands were that money bills 




The Irish Parliament House in the 1 8th century. 
Now the Bank of Ireland.] 

should originate in the Irish parliament itself, and that the principle of 
Septennial parliaments recognised in England should be applied also to 
Ireland. A third demand was for a Habeas Corpus Act, hitherto denied to 
Ireland, though acknowledged as a fundamental condition of the liberty of 
the subject in England. And behind these demands there were two more 
upon which the governing class were by no means agreed — one that the 
Catholics should no longer be treated as political pariahs ; and the other for 
what in England was called Economic Reform. For the abuses of the 
electoral system in England were intensified in Ireland and in Scotland 
also ; pensions and places were government instruments of corruption ; 
and an immense number of constituencies were controlled by a few persons 
known as " Undertakers," who obviously were peculiarly exposed to these 
corrupting influences. 

These demands became active about the time of the accession of George 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 691 

III., and they were invigorated by the development of the constitutional 
issue between the British parliament and the American colonies. Still 
the British parliament would have nothing to say to a Septennial Act or a 
Habeas Corpus Act, while the Irish parliament made a point of re- 
jecting the money bills sent over by the Privy Council from England. 

When Charles Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer his 
brother, Lord Townshend, was sent to Ireland as Viceroy. It was intended 
that this viceroyalty should inaugurate a new departure. Hitherto the 
viceroy had resided in Ireland only for six months in two years of office ; 
for the other eighteen months " Lord Justices" — in other words the Under- 
takers — had effective control of the administration. The Undertakers 
stood to "George in Ireland in something of the same relation as the Whig 
connection in England. The king wanted to break up their power as 
a combination while appropriating some of it to his own uses. This end 
was to be achieved partly by the continuous residence of the viceroy and 
partly by corruption, IYi the next place, however, George was deter- 
mined to obtain an augmentation of the standing army in Ireland at the 
expense of that country. The assent of Ireland to such a proposal could 
not be obtained unless some kind of a bargain, a quid pro quo, should be 
offered. 

The concession first put forward was that the judges should be made 
removable on an address presented by both Houses of the Irish parliament 
on the English analogy ; but the plan broke down on the demand of the 
British Privy Council that such an address should require endorsement by the 
Irish Privy Council. Then Townshend introduced an Octennial instead of a 
Septennial Bill, because the Irish parliament only sat in alternate years. 
The bill became law, the Government gained ground in a general elec- 
tion, and the augmentation scheme was passed, though the persistency of 
friction was demonstrated by another British refusal of the Habeas 
Corpus Act and another Irish rejection of a money bill sent from England. 
Townshend, however, judged himself strong enough to join battle with 
the Undertakers. Parliament was prorogued at the end of 1769, and when 
it met again in 177 1 he had secured his majority by a lavish em- 
ployment of every means of corruption at his disposal. The scandal, 
however, was too conspicuous, and next year Lord Harcourt took his 
place. 

The Irish demand was now concentrating upon the question whether 
the control of taxation was to lie in effect with the Irish or the British 
Legislature. The burden pressed very heavily upon Ireland ; and the 
Irish parliament proposed to meet the financial strain by taxing absentee 
landowners. Absenteeism inflicted grave injury on Ireland, because, among 
other reasons, the great rents drawn were expended not in Ireland but in 
England. Many of the greatest estates in Ireland were the property of 
Whigs who had still larger estates in England, and not unnaturally com- 
plained that they were to be penalised for residing on their English instead 



692 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

of on their Irish estates. The Rockingham group, who were hard hit by 
the proposed legislation, found themselves disapproving of Irish control 
of Irish taxation, while they were committing themselves to the strenuous 
advocacy of American control of American taxation, though Chatham and 
his followers refused to allow the personal consideration any weight against 
a constitutional principle. Thus it was a matter of course that Irish public 
opinion was completely in sympathy with the Americans, and when the 
American War broke out the British government had no little ground for 
fearing that Ireland would follow the American example. 

This fear was responsible for an inclination on the part of North's 
ministry to placate Irish sentiment in order that their own anxieties might 
be relieved. Hence North proposed a relaxation of the commercial re- 
strictions on Ireland ; but the determined refusal of the British commercial 
community to suffer Irish competition was too strong for the Government, and 
as in the case of the resistance of the English landlords to the absentee tax, 
British interests carried the day against those of Ireland. The concessions 
were reduced to little more than the admission of Ireland to the benefits of 
the Navigation Acts (1778). 

More effective was the measure of Catholic relief extended to Ireland, 
where the penal laws were still more stringent and more flagrantly unjust 
than in England. The worst features of the laws affecting the purchase 
and inheritance of land by Roman Catholics were done away with. Though 
a Catholic was still unable to purchase a freehold, he could take what 
came to practically the same thing, a lease for nine hundred and ninety- 
nine years ; and at the same time the laws which divided inherited land 
among all the sons, and the more iniquitous law which conferred the entire 
inheritance upon a Protestant brother, were abolished. 

The close resemblance of the case for Ireland to the case for the 
colonies, the correspondence between their constitutional and commercial 
grievances, and the aggravation of the Irish case by the racial, agrarian, 
and religious questions, were sufficient warrant for alarm lest the Irish 
should take example by the colonists. The French intervention in 1778 
gave the Irish an opportunity for a remarkable demonstration of their 
loyalty to the Empire in despite of grievances. The Government required 
every soldier it could muster to face its new foes. It had to withdraw the 
troops from Ireland and to take the immensely increased risk of an Irish 
insurrection and of the descent of French troops upon the island, as in the 
time of the Revolution of 1688 ; for, as we have seen, the British fleet at 
this stage was very far from holding an effective control of the seas. But 
instead of using England's peril as Ireland's opportunity for extorting con- 
cessions, the Protestants all over the country formed associations for im- 
perial defence, arming and drilling enthusiastic companies of volunteers ; 
and they were aided by liberal subscriptions from the Catholics, who were 
themselves forbidden by the law to carry arms. The great volunteer 
movement was emphatically imperial and loyalist, not insurrectionary. 




THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 693 

Nevertheless, it was undeniable that the development of the volunteer 
movement involved a material change in the situation. The volunteers 
were there to fight for the country ; like the army of the parliament in the 
great Civil War, mutatis mutandis, they stood for the national cause, and the 
nation could not afford to disband them while threatened by foreign 
invasion. But they were men with grievances which they meant to have 
remedied ; they might combine insistence on the remedies with their loyal 
enthusiasm ; and if the remedies were not conceded they might postpone 
loyalty to insistence on redress. Certainly the leaders would not urge 
their demands for redress less energetically when they and the Government 
both knew that the appeal to force had become 
practicable. When parliament met in the autumn 
of 1779 the foreign menace had become more 
marked because Spain also had declared war. 
The loyalty of the address to the Crown was un- 
qualified ; but it was coupled with a strongly 
expressed demand urged by all the leaders, of 
whom the most notable were Flood and Grattan, 
for the abolition of commercial restrictions. Supply 
was granted for six months only, and a bill for 
the relief of dissenters from the religious test, Henry Flood. 

which had been rejected in England, was again [From b T cZ°rfo7d d ] rawing 
introduced and passed. The argument was too 

convincing to be resisted. The British parliament opened the foreign 
trade to Ireland on the same terms as the foreign trade of Great Britain. 

Specific grievances might be remedied by consent of Great Britain 
under pressure ; but there was nothing to prevent their reimposition when 
the pressure was removed. So long as the parliament at Westminster 
asserted its right to legislate for Ireland, so long as the English Privy 
Council could dictate legislation in the Irish parliament, Ireland was in 
the position not of a partner in the Empire but of a subject province. By 
every principle of English liberty asserted when William of Orange was 
called to the throne of England, king, lords, and commons in Ireland should 
be the sovereign body there as they were the sovereign body in England, 
and the Privy Council had no better right to authority in one country than 
in the other. In effect, the Irish leaders claimed at this stage that the 
union of Great Britain with Ireland was by rights no more intimate than 
the union of England and Scotland under one crown before 1707. They 
claimed for Ireland the independence which had always belonged to Scot- 
land until she voluntarily accepted the incorporation with England. The 
theory was one which could not possibly be accepted without self stultifica- 
tion by the North ministry, which was irrevocably committed to the 
doctrine that the British parliament was supreme over all parts of the 
Empire ; even the Rockinghams had asserted that the supremacy could not 
be abrogated, though it ought only to be exercised in the very last resort. 



694 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

In April 1780 a resolution embodying the principle of independence 
was moved by Grattan but was not put to the vote. The next practical 
step was the introduction in the Irish parliament of an Irish Mutiny Bill. 
The point was this. The authority of the British parliament to legislate for 
Ireland had now been openly challenged. On Grattan's hypothesis, there- 
fore, the English Mutiny Act had no validity in Ireland. Its effective 
administration depended on the magistrates ; and the magistrates held with 
Grattan. Therefore, for the control of the army in Ireland there was need 
of a Mutiny Act passed by the Irish parliament itself. The Irish Mutiny 
Act, if it were annual, would give the same security to the Irish parliament 
which had been given to the English parliament by the annual Mutiny Act 
in England. The North ministry evaded the trap. The Mutiny Bill sent 
from Ireland was accepted, but it was made perpetual instead of annual ; 
and when it was returned to Ireland in this shape, the government influence 
was sufficient to procure a majority which passed it. But the parliamentary 
majority was like Newcastle's in 1766 ; it was representative not of public 
opinion, not even of the opinion of the classes which monopolised political 
liberty, but only of the power of corruption. Outside parliament the 
demand for independence was as unanimous as the demand had been in 
England for Pitt to supersede Newcastle at the helm of the state in 1756. 

Nevertheless, the volunteers were not to be shaken from their principle 
of associating the demand for political liberty with an unswerving loyalty. 
The surrender of Yorktown only confirmed them in this attitude. It was 
not government influence but the principle of loyalism that made them 
refuse an amendment to the address which would have added to it a 
demand for independence. Altogether the proceedings in the winter of 
1781-82 showed great fluctuations of voting. There were stalwarts who, 
without fear of being called disloyal, voted steadily for the demands of Grattan 
and Flood. There was a less uncompromising group which voted with them, 
except when it felt that the Government in its present straits ought not to 
be pressed too hard. There were the solid supporters of the Government. 
And there were still those who generally took their orders from the 
Government, but occasionally ventured to vote with the Opposition. It was 
not difficult to infer the real trend of opinion, but at any moment the 
voting in parliament might run directly counter to the real general feeling. 

But in February 1782 an assembly of delegates of the volunteers was 
summoned to meet at Dungannom There was no doubt at all that this 
body was genuinely representative ; they made it equally clear that public 
opinion endorsed the demands of Flood and Grattan ; and, at Grattan's own 
instance, they added demands for the further relaxation of the penal code 
against the Catholics. In March the North ministry resigned, and the 
second Rockingham ministry accepted in the main the three Irish demands. 
The Mutiny Act was limited to two years, the control exercised by the Irish 
and English Privy Councils was abolished, and the obnoxious Declaratory 
Act was repealed. Grattan's parliament, the independent parliament of 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 695 

Ireland, had come into being. The repeal of the Declaratory Act was 
confirmed and secured against misinterpretation in the following year by 
the Renunciatory Act, which expressly declared that the British parliament 
had not the power of legislating for Ireland. A new but brief chapter in 
the history of Ireland was opened, to be ended by the Incorporating Union 
of 1800. 

II 
ENCLOSURE, MACHINERY, AND CANALS 

From the beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the 
eighteenth there was a steady and continuous commercial and maritime 
expansion, but it was attended by no great changes in the rural and in- 
dustrial populations. The era of enclosures had come to an end ; the 
greater part of the country in fact remained still unenclosed and still culti- 
vated under the open field system, tilled by the small farmers, yeomen, 
copyholders, or small tenants-at-will who, in ordinary circumstances, re- 
mained in undisturbed occupation from generation to generation. The 
cottar and the labourer had little inclination and little temptation to migrate 
from the parish of their birth ; if they did move they became liable under 
the Restoration Law of Settlement to be promptly ordered back to their 
previous abode lest any parish should find itself chargeable with the 
maintenance of pauper immigrants from other districts. The Elizabethan 
Poor Law prevented actual destitution, and generally provided some sort 
of work for the able-bodied. The development of the domestic industries 
of spinning and weaving supplemented the earnings of the farm-hand, and 
yielded a margin for the small farmer who lived chiefly upon the produce 
of his farm. Some new industries, too, were developed by the Huguenot 
immigrants who fled from the persecution of Louis XIV. 

For the first fifty years of the eighteenth century matters went on in 
very much the same fashion. Yeoman and cottar lived on, not in penury 
but in a respectable kind of poverty,, very rarely on the verge of starvation, 
but very rarely in a condition of what could fairly be called comfort. The 
age was apathetic and unambitious, too unambitious to be discontented ; 
and benevolent moralists observed with satisfaction that children were 
taught the virtues of industry and helped to earn their own living almost 
as soon as they could talk. There was very little in the shape of class 
antagonism, none of the opposition between capital and labour which was 
the outcome of a later industrialism, none of the opposition between gentry 
and peasantry which was presently to become so terribly conspicuous in 
France — because in England the peasantry were in no sense serfs, and the 
gentry were commonly disposed to a mildly paternal benevolence. There 
was no incentive to agricultural progress because the old open field system 
still kept the comparatively enterprising spirits among the small holders at 



696 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

the mercy of their slow-moving neighbours. The small farmer, even if he 
had the will, lacked the means to try experiments or to adopt new methods 
which paid when they were applied upon a large but not upon a small 
scale. 

On the other hand, considerable progress was made in agricultural 
methods by large proprietors. They introduced the growing of roots and 

grasses ; they adopted an 
improved rotation of crops, 
| and very considerable ad- 
vances were made in cattle- 
breeding. But the point to 
be immediately observed is 
that the progress was made 
on the estates where en- 
closure had already been 
carried out — enclosure, that 
is, in the sense of the aboli- 
tion of the open fields made 
up of acre strips, and the 
substitution of the large en- 
closed fields worked under 
a single management. The 
yeoman farmed for subsist- 
ence, the owner of a large 
estate farmed for commercial 
profit ; he could turn ex- 
periment and enterprise to 
financial account, while he 
was able to produce at less 
cost than the small farmer 
with his antiquated methods. 
As yet, however, the yeoman 
did not feel the pinch of competition. The owner of a great estate might 
be desirous of extending his operations and anxious to carry enclosure 
further ; but the yeoman, as long as he could hold his ground, was not 
inclined to make way for him, and he was able to hold his ground by 
help of the subsidiary occupations of weaving and spinning. Enclosure 
went on during the first half of the eighteenth century, but it went on 
very slowly. 

Then a change began to set in, the change which brought about 
the practical extinction of the yeoman and the absorption of the land 
of the small freeholder and copyholder into the large estate. It is possible 
that if there had been no Industrial Revolution the yeoman and the cottar 
might have survived ; possible but not probable, for the yeoman, through 
no fault of his own, or only partly by his own fault, stood in the way 




A typical " strip " farm or open field. 

[At Laxton, Northants. Retained until late in the 19th century.] 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 697 

of agricultural progress and prevented the development of the productive 
power of ihe country. The mere necessity for that development would 
probably have swept him away in any case, but his fate was sealed by 
the destruction of the domestic industries which had kept him afloat. 
Oliver Goldsmith, in his Deserted Village (1770), gives a sentimental 
description of the decay of rural life, attributed to the greed and oppression 
of the wealthy ; but in fact the yeoman and the cottar were finding them- 
selves no longer able to make a living ; they were perishing from economic 
pressure, not from the avarice of their wealthier neighbours, who were 
able to make infinitely more productive the land which small men were 
driven to resign, while the small men themselves were absorbed into 
the mass of wage-labourers. 

Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century four-fifths of 
the population, or not much less, was rural, living not in the towns but 
in farms and villages, and practically the whole of that rural population 
was occupied simultaneously with agriculture in the inclusive sense and 
the domestic industries. In the neighbourhood of the centres of cloth 
manufacture, still the principal manufacture of the country, the domestic 
industries were their mainstay and the field-work was supplementary. 
Further afield the order was reversed, and the product of field-work was 
supplemented by the domestic industries. Textiles of one sort or another — 
woollens, cotton, linen, silk — were the principal products, woollens having 
an immense preponderance in England, linens in Ireland and to a less 
degree in Scotland. Silk was the specialty of the Huguenot immigrants, 
and the importance of cotton was still in the future. 

The spinning and weaving on which these manufactures depended 
were domestic industries — industries, that is to say, conducted at the 
fireside of each household — so long as the loom and the spinning-wheel 
might properly be called not machines but tools. When we distinguish 
between tools and machinery we mean by the former implements driven 
by the workman himself, by the latter implements in which another driving 
power is brought into play. Machinery existed in the windmills and water- 
mills, where the power of wind and water was utilised for grinding corn, 
and in the steam-pump, an invention of the last century which was in 
use chiefly in mines. The great feature of the last forty years of the 
century was the invention of machinery driven first by water power and 
then by steam power, which began by displacing the hand-loom and the 
spinning-wheel, and went on to revolutionise the entire industrial system. 

The era of inventions was initiated with what was still a new "tool." The 
weavers could not produce fast enough ; that is to say, the spinners could 
supply them with yarn faster than they could weave it. The output of 
the weavers was doubled when John Kay invented the fly-shuttle in 1732, 
for the new shuttle enabled them to weave cloth of double width. The 
spinners were left behind until, in 1764, Hargreave invented the spinning- 
jenny, which worked eight spindles at once by a single action ; and 



698 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Hargreave was followed five years later by Richard Arkwright, who invented 
a jenny driven by water power. Arkwright's water-frame was the harbinger 
of the new machinery. It initiated the application of water power to 
manufacture ; and the application of water power was the beginning of 
the end of domestic industries, because the hand worker could not compete 
with the machines, and the machines were necessarily set up not in the 
farm-house or cottage but where water power was available on the banks 
of streams. The water-frame was followed ten years later by Crompton's 
machine known as the u mule " ; but the weavers did not get a power-loom 

until Cartwright's machine was invented 
in 1784. So far as concerned these 
two domestic industries of spinning 
and weaving, all the advances from 
1764 until 1784 were in spinning. 

Any improvements in tools and 
machinery mean that for a given ex- 
penditure of human energy and labour 
either a better quality or a greater 
quantity of goods can be produced, 
or both. An improvement in quality 
is a benefit which has no drawbacks ; 
increase in quantity is injurious to the 
producer unless increased demand keep 
pace with increased supply. Labour- 
saving is almost always beneficial in 
the long run, because in the long run 
demand overtakes supply ; but it is 
not always so at the outset. Thus, 
spinning-jenny, it was the spinners who 
with their increased 
But for 




An old hand weaver at his loom. 
[From the " Universal Magazine," 1747.] 



before the invention of the 

gained by the fly-shuttle, because the weavers 

power of production wanted all the yarn they could get. .But lor a 
time there was not enough yarn to go round among the weavers, and 
their profits were reduced. Then the spinning-jenny multiplied the pro- 
ductive capacity of the spinners ; the weavers got as much yarn as they 
could manage, and a smaller number of spinners than before were able 
with ease to meet the whole available demand ; therefore the spinners in 
their turn suffered. When the public wanted all that the clothiers could 
supply, the clothiers wanted all that the weavers could supply, and the 
weavers wanted all that the spinners could supply, every one was the better ; 
but when the weavers wanted more than the spinners could supply they 
suffered, and when they wanted less the spinners suffered. It was only in 
the long run that the balance became adjusted, when lowered prices 
increased the demand. 

In the period of which we are speaking the balance was not adjusted ; 
the whole mass of those whose livelihood depended mainly or partly upon 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 699 

the spinning-wheel suffered, and that meant the greater portion of the 
rural population. In part at least this was the cause-of the disappearance 
of the cottar and yeoman, and the rapid progress of enclosure. And this 
in turn meant the increase of poverty and even of destitution in the rural 
districts, and a demand for a revised administration of the poor law in 
order to cope with it. Once again poor relief became a pressing problem, 
which was dealt with by Gilbert's Acts in 1782. One of these was directed 
to the combination of parishes in unions for the better organisation of poor 
law administration. But the Acts between them introduced a system of 
outdoor relief for the able-bodied, and gave extended power to the magistrates 
for the application of rates to the mitigation of distress. The magistrates 
were benevolent and well-intentioned, but short-sighted ; and later we shall 




The canal aqueduct over the river IrwelL 
[From a print of 1793.] 



see that before the end of the century they applied their powers with most 
disastrous results. 

In another field a great change was inaugurated, the precursor of 
another change which was to be in operation three-quarters of a century- 
later. Until after the middle of the eighteenth century, traffic and com- 
munication were conducted entirely by road, that is, by the packhorse 
and the waggon, or by sea. Practically no use was made of waterways ; 
the roads themselves were for the most part villainously bad, and the cost 
of transport was exceedingly heavy. The Duke of Bridgewater was the 
pioneer of the canal system. He discovered an engineer of extraordinary 
genius in the person of the wholly illiterate James Brindley, and in 1758 
he obtained sanction by an Act of parliament for the construction of a 
canal between Worsley and Manchester. In 1761 the canal was opened, 
although Brindley's schemes for it had been jeered at as visionary and 
impracticable. Men saw with amazement ships passing over an aqueduct 
forty feet above the river Irwell. So much did this seven-mile canal reduce 
the cost of carriage between Worsley and Manchester that the price of coal 



7 oo THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

in Manchester was halved. The effect of Brindley's success was instan- 
taneous. In the next twenty years many hundreds of miles of canals were 
planned and carried out ; before the end of the century there was a 
network of canals all over the country. An infinitely greater bulk of goods 
could be carried in much greater security on barges than in waggons, at a 
very much smaller expenditure of horse power and labour, though there 
was no diminution of either, owing to the enormous increase in the amount 
of traffic. 

The spirit of invention was abroad. Hitherto we have spoken of it 
only in its application to the industries which touched the agrarian popula- 
tion. English pottery also rose to a new eminence, Josiah Wedgwood 
leading the way. But of all the inventions the most decisively influential 
on the national industries were those which were concerned with iron, 
coal, and steam. The development of the iron industry depended upon the 
furnace, and in the first half of the century charcoal was still the necessary 
fuel. Hence, although the quantity of iron in the soil was immense the 
output was small ; the iron-fields were limited to the regions where forests 
were available, and Sussex held a foremost place among the iron counties. 
Coal was of no use, because a sufficient blast could not be obtained, 
although towards the middle of the century there was a considerable de- 
velopment in the use of coke in the works of the Darbies of Coalbrookdale. 
But in 1760 Smeaton applied water power to the production of a blast 
which at once enormously increased the employment first of coke and then 
of coal as fuel, as well as the output of iron. Iron rapidly became the 
standard material for purposes for which it had hitherto been undreamed of, 
and the first iron bridge was carried over the Severn in 1779. 

This association of iron with coal instead of with charcoal gave an 
enormous advantage in production to the districts where iron and coal- 
fields were contiguous, and it drove out of the industrial race the iron 
districts like Sussex, which depended upon charcoal, as they were too 
remote from the coal regions to make use of that fuel. In these districts, 
therefore, there was a diminution of employment ; whereas there was 
rapidly increasing employment both in the coalpits and in the iron works 
of the north and the midlands. It must be borne in mind, however, that 
the shifting of the population only followed the shifting of employment 
very slowly. The physical difficulties of migration were immense. It is 
easier to-day for the working-man to transport himself with his family 
from England to Canada than it was a hundred and fifty years ago for the 
Sussex labourer to remove himself to Lancashire. And to the physical 
difficulty of transport was added the artificial barrier of the Restoration 
Law of Settlement, which allowed the local authority to send the immigrant 
back to the parish or hundred of his birth. 

The development of the coalfields and of the iron industry necessarily 
went together ; the development of both and their mutual need of each 
other was enormously advanced when the inventions of James Watt made 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 701 

steam the motive power of machinery. Iron was the material of which 
the new machinery was made, and the steam by which it was driven de- 
manded coal. The steam-engine was the last and most important factor 
in the creation of the new industrialism which subsisted upon coal and 
iron. The steam-engine had established itself securely in the iron works 
before the American War was over and during the next decade ; and it 
was rapidly pushing to the front as the leading power for driving mills. 
The effects will be discussed in a later chapter dealing with the period 
when they had come into full play. 

In the first twenty years of George III. the employment of steam power 
was still in its infancy. Watt's steam-engine was the child of Newcomen's 
steam-pump, which, with modifications, had been worked 
in mines for half a century without leading to any notable 
development, when James Watt began his experiments. 
Watt, who at the time was engaged as a maker of mathe- 
matical instruments in Glasgow, was employed to repair 
one of these engines in 1763. The pump suggested ex- 
periments from which Watt very soon realised the tre- 
mendous powers of steam and the principles by which it 
could be employed in the service of man. The first 
opportunities for developing his ideas in practical material 
shape were given him in Roebuck's iron works at Carron 
near Glasgow; but it was not till 1776 that a really Adam Smith. 

successful engine was constructed for Wilkinson, the Iron [Froma^medaiiionby 
King, at Boxley ; hitherto the practical difficulty of obtain- 
ing accurate workmanship in the hard metal which was required had 
stood in the way. When once that difficulty was mastered progress was 
rapid. 

One more event must be recorded which forms a landmark in economic 
history, the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith's Enquiry into the Nature 
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. For nearly three centuries the doctrines 
collectively described as the Mercantile Theory had been generally accepted. 
With national power as the state's grand object, it had been assumed to be 
the business of the state to control commerce and industry, and to direct 
them along the channels most conducive to national power ; wealth or 
material prosperity was assumed to follow power ; and since the possession 
of treasure, that is to say gold and silver, was accepted as a condition of 
national power, the accumulation of treasure, the exchange of goods for 
treasure, was one of the leading objects which the state set before itself in 
the control of commerce. Other objects were maritime expansion and the 
encouragement of industries which were looked upon as fostering a healthy 
and vigorous breed of Englishmen. It was an accident, not of the essence, 
of the theory, that mercantilism carried with it in practice the protection of 
native industries against foreign competition. Adam Smith rejected the 
" treasure " theory, because the balance of trade rectifies itself automatically. 




7 o2 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

If there is deficiency of treasure in the country, money is in demand and 
its value in exchange rises ; in other words, prices fall ; the foreigner sees 
a market in which he can buy cheaply, and treasure flows in again. Not 
treasure in particular, but material wealth in general, the abundance of 
useful commodities, is the source of power, and the maximum amount of 
general wealth is to be obtained not by the artificial direction of commerce 
and industry into particular channels, but by leaving the individual to 
pursue his own interest. Power follows wealth, not wealth power ; every- 
thing which checks the development of wealth checks also the development 
of power ; and therefore all restrictions for the direction of commerce and 
industry are prima facie injurious. Further, it is a mistake to suppose that 
our own prosperity is increased by injury to our neighbour's, and that their 
prosperity is detrimental to us ; our neighbour's prosperity would increase 
the volume of our own trade. The control of trade may be warranted for 
a specific purpose, as in the case of the Navigation Acts, since an island 
nation is directly dependent for its prosperity on the maximum develop- 
ment of its marine ; but in general the fullest freedom of exchange is 
desirable, irrespective of the questions whether the particular country 
exchanges more treasure for goods or more goods for treasure, which had 
hitherto been the controlling consideration in framing commercial treaties. 
Adam Smith's doctrine bore fruit in the next decade in the commercial and 
financial policy of William Pitt, who was his enthusiastic disciple ; later it 
was developed into those principles of the Laissez Faire Economists, which 
gradually gained an ascendency during the first half, and were completely 
dominant during the second half, of the nineteenth century, in Great 
Britain. 



Ill 

LITERATURE 

John Dryden died in the year 1700. Samuel Johnson died in 1784. 
The date of Johnson's first notable publication was 1738, a few years 
before the death of two of the most prominent literary figures of the 
previous period, Pope and Swift, the survivors of a literary circle which had 
once included Addison. Johnson's own circle after 1761 included Burke 
and Goldsmith and touched Sheridrm. This list of names suggests the 
characteristics of the whole period ; in the whole number there is only one, 
Edmund Burke, who was not essentially a man of his century — whose 
work was not an expression of its conventions. As concerns literary form, 
these were the men who themselves set the conventions which lesser men 
followed ; but the literary form was itself the finished expression of the 
moral and intellectual spirit of the age. Within a few years of Johnson's 
death an entirely new spirit had manifested itself, and the canons which 




Dr. Johnson. 

[From an engraving by 
Finden.] 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 703 

had guided or had been laid down by the writers of the eighteenth century 
were entirely discarded. 

Poetry, a great critic has said, is a " criticism of life " ; the poetry in 
which an age expresses itself affords at any rate a conclusive criterion of the 
way in which that age looked upon life. The predomin- 
ance of the lyrical over the rhetorical implies the pre- 
dominance of the emotional over the rational, and vice 
versa. Until Johnson was dead, rhetorical poetry held the 
field throughout the eighteenth century ; the era produced 
only one lyrical poet of importance, William Collins, 
though Pope was the most consummate master of the 
art which claims a purely intellectual appreciation. The 
Restoration in the seventeenth century brought with it a 
revolt of the intellectuals against the tyranny of moral 
strenuousness — not merely the sour rigidity of the 
narrowest Puritanism but^ the emotional intensity which 
had produced a Milton and a Cromwell. In its first 
emancipation it flung aside morality altogether. Then 
came a reaction, when it was realised that there was no 
essential antagonism between the moral and the intellectual. 
Under the serene guidance of Addison, decency again became " the mode," 
and Pope, in finely polished couplets, stereotyped the somewhat superficial 
philosophy of cultured common-sense. The morality which could be 

expressed in epigrams reigned supreme, even 
while immorality which could shelter behind 
epigrammatic formulae was rampant. But the 
criteria applied were those of the intelligence, 
not those of the heart ; the emotions, except as 
playthings appropriate to the boudoir, were at a 
discount. Where there is no enthusiasm there 
can be no lyrical poetry, and the Augustan 
Age knew not enthusiasm. 

It called itself Augustan not inappropriately, 
for it had much in common with the age of the 
first Roman emperor, an imitative age with 
little in it that was spontaneous ; an artificial 
age ; on the surface graceful, refined, and polite, 
below the veneer barbarically gross, and at 
heart earthy and materialistic. Literature took 
possession of what was best in it, and that best 
has a unique charm, an attraction of its own; 
but it is something very different from the best of the Elizabethans with 
their vivid and all-pervading vitality, of the Puritans with their fervour of 
righteousness, or of the new spirit which burst in!o life with the dying 
century. The materialism was at its worst in the second quarter of the 




Alexander Pope. 

[From a crayon drawing in the Bodleian 
Library.] 



704 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

century ; but it continued dominant even while a sturdier morality, deepei 
rooted, more akin in its nature to Puritanism, was making progress ; while 
Samuel Johnson by force of character more than of intellect was gradually 
achieving a supremacy among English men of letters ; while the Great 
Commoner in the political world, Wesley in the religious world, were 
breathing life into the dry bones. The breed of English men of action 
had not worn itself out, but the reviving national capacity for enthusiasm, 
faith, and loyalty was not to bear full fruit until a later generation. 

In such an age, then, it was impossible that lyrical poetry should flourish 
in England. Collins stood by himself, while Gray's Odes have little if at all 

more of the lyrical quality than 
those of Dryden or Pope. In Scot- 
land song still lived, for Scotland 
was still emotional, still capable of 
enthusiasm, or there would have 
been no " Forty Five." But even 
in Scotland the song which was 
spontaneous was also anonymous. 
And as the repression of the deeper 
emotions was destructive of song, 
so also it was destructive of the 
higher drama which involves the 
dramatic insteadof lyrical expression 
of the deeper emotions. Tragedy, 
instead of depicting human passion, 
was unreal, conventional, and rhe- 
torical. But the very conditions which were ill adapted for tragedy were 
perfectly compatible with the development of a prose comedy which is of 
its nature concerned with the light and superficial aspects of life ; and in 
their own delightful kind, towards the close of our period, the comedies of 
two Irishmen, Goldsmith and Sheridan, are unsurpassed ; just as at an 
earlier stage Pope's Rape of the Lock was a quite perfect piece of irrespon- 
sible daintiness. 

The eighteenth century, however, if it was not a great age of poetry, 
was great in prose, and in other realms of prose than that of theatrical 
comedy. At its outset the short essay was almost perfected by Steele and 
Addison in the pages of the Taller and the Spectator. Pamphleteering was 
elevated into a fine art by Defoe and Swift. Defoe, in a series of works 
unmatched in their realism from the Journal of the Plague to Robinson Crusoe, 
created the English Novel ; and Swift made the travels of Gulliver to 
Lilliput and Brobdingnag almost as convincing as the adventures of Crusoe 
himself. Addison's creation of Sir Roger de Coverley reveals an aspect of 
English life which shows that the general materialism was still far from 
being universal, and gives the first promise of the English novel of char- 
acter. 




An " Exquisite" of 1720. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 705 

About the time when Johnson was first shouldering his way into the 
London world of letters, the novel of sentimental respectability was given 
its vogue by Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which helped at least to inspire 
Henry Fielding to the production of Joseph Andrews as a sort of antidote 
to Richardson's mawkishness. Richardson wrote for ladies, Fielding did 
not. Richardson was a moralist and a sentimentalist, Fielding was neither. 
But it was Fielding who, like Defoe, held the mirror up to nature and 
painted life as he saw it in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the 
robust and virile humour and fidelity which made Scott and Thackeray 
regard him as the father of the novel. Of the same school, though with 
an exaggerated coarseness, was Tobias Smol- 
lett ; with these two names is associated that 
of Lawrence Sterne, whose exquisite humour 
was counterbalanced by a sort of refined 
indecency much more corrupting than the 
audacity of Fielding or Mhe grossness of 
Smollett ; and Goldsmith gave Sir Roger de 
Coverley a companion in the " Man in Black " 
of the Citizen of the World, and produced an 
exquisite novel of real life which was neither 
mawkish nor coarse in the Vicar of Wake- 
field. 

Before 1760 Ireland and Scotland had 
taken their share in the production of 
English literature. Swift and Steele were 
both born in Dublin. Smollett was a Scot, 
and so were such minor lights as James 
Thomson, the author of The Seasons, and 
John Home, whose tragedy of Douglas was 
received with enthusiastic if evanescent applause. Hardly recognised as 
yet, but destined to be far more influential, was the work of the Scotsman 
David Hume, whose importance in the history of moral and metaphysical 
speculation can hardly be over-estimated, while his History of England, 
though in many respects untrustworthy, gives him a place in the front 
rank of English historians. In the realm of philosophy Hume, himself an 
audacious and original thinker, was almost equalled in originality and im- 
portance by his predecessor, George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. 

And after 1760 the prominence of Scots and Irishmen increased. In 
the lighter walks of literature the achievement of Goldsmith and Sheridan 
has already been noted. If Johnson, the greatest literary figure of the time, 
was English through and through, his biography, the acknowledged master- 
piece of its kind, was the work of the Scot Boswell. Burke, the Irishman, 
was the greatest political thinker of the day, unless we except the Scot 
Adam Smith, whose great work the Wealth of Nations raised political economy, 
which had hitherto been little more than empirical, into an acknowledged 

2 Y 




Henry Fielding, by Hogarth. 
[From the 1772 edition of Fielding's "Works."] 



7 o6 THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

science, and revolutionised the prevalent ideas on the subject. But though 
Hume as a historian was surpassed by another Scot, William Robertson, 
the acknowledged supremacy in that field belongs to the Englishman 
Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire stands by itself without 
a rival. 



BOOK VI 

THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

CHAPTER XXIX 

BETWEEN THE WARS 

I 

PITT'S DOMESTIC POLICY 

The return of Pitt to power was something very different from the 
establishment of a ministry of king's friends fourteen years before. Pitt 
was no subservient politician prepared to act merely as the mouthpiece of 
the king. He had behind him in parliament a large majority, but not a 
compact one, nor one upon which he could rely to follow his lead, although 
in the main it accepted his guidance. The principal reason why that 
majority had been returned was that public feeling was disgusted by the 
coalition of Fox and North, in which it appeared that both Fox and North 
had thrown over their principles in order to secure power by combination. 
A large proportion of North's former followers retained their old attach- 
ment to the Crown, and deserted North when he deserted the Crown. 
Chatham's admirers rallied to the support of Chatham's son ; there was a 
proportion of Whigs who would not commit themselves to the latest Whig 
doctrine, that the king had nothing to do but to accept the ministers at 
their own dictation. These various elements gradually crystallised into 
what became the new Tory party ; but in the first years of its existence, 
before it acquired a special character in consequence of the French Revolu- 
tion, its leader was ,a reformer, many of whose aims were only realised by 
what was coming to be called Liberalism half a century afterwards. Pitt, 
like his father, was personally incorruptible, and anxious to cut at the roots 
of the practice of corruption. He desired the reform of representation. 
He desired the removal of the restrictions on trade. He desired the relief 
of Roman Catholics, and was a warm advocate of the abolition of the slave 
trade. But, while he was able to carry out his financial policy, he was 
able to retain office only because it was not yet recognised constitutional 
doctrine that ministers defeated in the House of Commons on an important 

issue should either resign or appeal to the country. He could not command 

707 



7 o8 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

a majority in the House on specific issues ; but he did not therefore resign 
until a specific issue arose between himself and the king on a question as 
to which he considered himself finally pledged. 

When Pitt began his long career as Prime Minister the world at large 
believed that the British Empire was tottering. It had been rent in twain ; 
it was exhausted by the strain of a long war, waged against a group of 
powers. Its naval ascendency had been all but lost, and even now was 

in question. Its government had 
gone to pieces, and the reorganisa- 
tion depended on the wisdom and 
skill of a youth of four-and-twenty. 
But now for nearly nine years Pitt 
kept the country at peace ; during 
the peace its commerce and its wealth 
expanded with renewed vigour, and 
when once more Britain went to 
war, she was able to emerge from it 
triumphantly. The wealth she had 
acquired provided her with the means, 
and her maritime power preserved 
her commerce till she had what was 
practically a monopoly of the sea- 
borne traffic ; while the exploiting 
of her native supplies of coal and 
iron joined with the triumphs of her 
inventors to create for her almost a 
monopoly of manufacture. The new 
manufacture and the new organisa- 
tion of transport secured the success 
of Pitt's financial policy. 

The main principles of Pitt's 
finance were derived from Adam 
Smith. The error of seeking to raise 
revenue by high tariffs had been shown by the successful lowering of 
tariffs under Walpole and in the first Rockingham administration. The 
high duties on tea and spirits ensured to the smugglers large profits which 
compensated the risks of the illicit traffic. Vast quantities of these articles 
were brought into the country without paying the duties, and many 
eminently respectable persons profited thereby, since they considered 
themselves to be under no obligation to know whether the goods they 
bought were smuggled or not. Pitt lowered the duties, and to com- 
pensate the immediate loss of revenue he imposed a window tax — which 
could not be evaded, because the number of windows in a house could be 
ascertained by the simple process of counting — and every penny of the tax 
except the small amount absorbed in collecting it went direct to the revenue. 




The Right Hon. William Pitt. 
[After the portrait by Gainsborough.] 



BETWEEN THE WARS 709 

For it was one of Adam Smith's principles that since all taxation is to a 
certain extent a check upon the increase of wealth, the state, which must 
impose taxation for the purposes of revenue, should see that the whole of 
the tax goes to the revenue ; taxation to regulate trade, not for the purposes 
of revenue, being inadmissible because the only effect must be to hinder 
trade. On the other hand, the lowering of the duties on tea and spirits 
reduced their price in the market correspondingly, diminished the induce- 
ment to smuggling and the expenditure on the preventive service, and 
brought an increased quantity of the goods into the country through the 
legitimate channel. The same principles 
were applied to other imports, as had 
been done half a century earlier by 
Walpole. In particular the import of 
raw material was encouraged by re- 
duced tariffs, although the British manu- 
facturer had not yet leapnt, as he learnt 
in the first half of the nineteenth century, 
to believe in the admission of the foreign 
competitor. It was not yet possible to 
attack tariffs of a purely protective char- 
acter, in each one of which some vested 
interests were at stake. 

The passing of the old ideas of com- 
mercial policy was illustrated when Pitt 
negotiated a commercial treaty with 
France in 1786. Each country had 
hitherto followed a policy of excluding 
the other's goods. No one since 1713 
had attempted in practice to traverse 
that principle. But now professed economists had nothing to say against 
opening up commerce with France ; the opposition was mainly expressed 
by Fox, who denounced the treaty on the ground that France, our 
hereditary foe, would profit by it. A few years later Fox was less ready 
to denounce our hereditary foe. The French denounced the treaty, 
because they profited by it a good deal less than the British. But nobody 
denounced it as injurious to the balance of trade. 

An important economy introduced by Pitt was the abolition of the 
existing method of receiving tenders for public loans. Such loans had been 
floated by private arrangement and were a gross means of corruption, North's 
Government in particular having conceded the most extravagant terms for 
party ends. Pitt threw the tenders open to public competition, which at 
once secured the best terms possible for the Treasury and destroyed a 
principal source of corruption. It is remarkable, however, that the 
financial scheme in which Pitt himself took most pride, and which was 
hailed with the most enthusiastic applause, was one whose unsoundness 




"The RareeShow." 
[A caricature on Pitt's taxation and foreign policy.] 



yio THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

was already apparent within a few years of his death, and was possibly 
realised by himself some time earlier. This was his scheme for a Sinking 
Fund which was to wipe out the National Debt. Walpole had instituted a 
sinking fund, but it had been so repeatedly and so unscrupulously raided 
that only a fraction of it had really been appropriated to the reduction of the 
debt. Pitt's plan was to set aside .£1,000,000 annually, which was to be 
handed over to a special board, not political, which was to invest it. It 
was imagined that, accumulating at compound interest, it would in a few 
years extinguish the entire debt. So long as the money could be set aside 
out of revenue it was true that the higher interest received by investing 
money would accumulate a fund for paying off the capital debt ; but the 
scheme broke down as soon as the pressure on government compelled it to 
resort to borrowing at higher rates. For in effect the sinking fund was then 
provided for out of the borrowed money, not out of revenue, and when the 
country was at war, the money was borrowed at a higher rate of interest 
than that obtained by its investment. A sinking fund for paying off the 
debt on which there is a low rate of interest at once becomes unsound if 
it can only be provided for by incurring a new debt at a higher rate of 
interest. 

In another attempt to act upon free trade principles Pitt was defeated. 
The question of commerce was still an acute source of friction with Ireland, 
in the same sort of way as had been the case when there was an independent 
Scottish legislature. There had been a partial relaxation of the restrictions 
upon Irish trade under North's Government. Pitt proposed to carry the 
matter very much further, and in effect, though still with some exceptions, 
to treat Great Britain and Ireland as a fiscal unit. The commercial gain 
to Ireland would have been great ; nevertheless in Ireland, as well as in 
England, Pitt's measure was resolutely opposed. In England the opposition 
came from the commercial classes, who resented being exposed to Irish 
competition. In Ireland the opposition was political, and was based on 
the fact that, if the countries were treated as a fiscal unit, the whole financial 
control would lie at Westminster, and Ireland, unrepresented at Westminster, 
would have no voice in it at all. The independence of the Irish parliament 
won in 1782 would be curtailed in a very important particular, and to this 
the Irish parliament would not assent, especially in view of the limitations 
which the commercial interest in England had forced upon Pitt's own 
scheme. The measure therefore was dropped and was not again revived. 

While Pitt was still an independent member of the British parliament, 
outside the Government, he had constituted himself the champion of parlia- 
mentary reform of which his father had been a strong advocate. The 
system had ceased to be representative ; but while the demand for recon- 
struction became periodically insistent outside parliament, so that Chatham 
had pronounced that if parliament did not soon reform itself, it would be 
reformed " with a vengeance " from outside, the members themselves were 
not reformers. Too many of them sat for pocket boroughs to be willing 



BETWEEN THE WARS 7 u 

for the abolition of pocket boroughs, and the controllers of pocket 
boroughs were equally adverse to a change. Pitt's plan now was to ex- 
tinguish thirty-six of these constituencies, and to increase the representation 
of the counties correspondingly. London and Westminster were also to 
have an increase, a share in the seventy-two seats provided by the abolition 
of thirty-six constituencies. So far Fox and his followers were ready to 
support Pitt against the vested interests which were opposed to reform ; but 
Pitt proposed to recognise those vested interests by buying them out, and 
to this Fox would not consent. The result was that Pitt was unable to 
carry the measure, and parliamentary reform was driven off the field of 
practical politics for forty years by the anti-democratic reaction born of 
the French Revolution. 

In spite then of this defeat on sundry measures of first-rate importance, 
to which may be added his failure to carry parliament with him in his 
desire to abolish the slave trade, Pitt remained Prime Minister ; nor did 
the theory and practice >pf the constitution call for his resignation. Yet at 
the end of 1788 it seemed exceedingly probable that his ministerial career 
would be brought to an abrupt conclusion. The king was again attacked 
by the brain malady with which he had been threatened twenty-two years 
before. At once the question of the regency became acute. The Prince 
of Wales and his brothers, in accordance with the family tradition, were on 
bad terms with their father, and the prince himself was on intimate terms 
with the leaders of the Opposition, Fox and Sheridan. Obviously he was 
the natural person to assume the regency. The Opposition claimed that it 
belonged to him by constitutional right ; that if the king were incapacitated, 
it followed that the heir-apparent should discharge the monarchical functions 
unless it had been otherwise decided by the king in parliament. Pitt, on 
the other hand, claimed that it rested with the Estates to appoint the 
regent and to define his powers, although it was admitted that the Prince 
of Wales was the person who would naturally be appointed. The power 
of the Crown, however, was still so great that it was assumed on all hands 
that, if the prince became regent, Pitt would be dismissed and the govern- 
ment would pass to a Fox ministry. The curious spectacle was seen of 
the Whigs, led by Fox, asserting the hereditary prerogative in a most 
uncompromising form, while Pitt and the Tories were the champions of 
the rights of parliament, the paradox being partly accounted for by the 
suspicion that if the Whig doctrine were carried and the prince became in 
effect king, the king himself would not recover power even if he recovered 
his health. English public opinion was with Pitt, and demanded the 
limitation of the powers which should be conferred upon the prince as 
regent, and the recognition of the principle that he could not claim the 
regency as a constitutional right. There was no precedent for the situation, 
but in any case it was felt that the regency of the prince would involve 
Pitt's retirement. The position, however, was saved by the king's recovery 
before the Regency Bill had passed through the Lords. Pitt, instead of 



7 1-2 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

being driven into private life, was more firmly established in power and in 
the royal favour than before. 



II 



FOREIGN POLICY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 



For five-and-twenty years after the Peace of Paris, Great Britain had 
stood aloof from continental politics, in the isolation which Bute had pro- 
cured for her. For a 
dozen years she had 
neglected Europe as 
though its affairs had 
no interest for her ; she 
had paid no attention 
while France absorbed 
Corsica and while 
Russia, Austria, and 
Prussia absorbed the 
greater part of Poland 
among them. Then the 
American War had put 
it out of her power 
to concern herself with 
the doings of other 
nations, though other 
nations had found the 
opportunity to concern 
themselves very actively 
with her affairs ; and 
then Pitt, in the early 
years of his adminis- 
tration, recognised that 
the first essential for 
Britain was to set her 
own house in order. 
The revival of pros- 
perity however was rapid, and by 1788 Pitt was ready for the country 
to assert itself in foreign affairs if the occasion should arise. 

In spite of the French commercial treaty, Bourbon aggression was the 
inevitable object of suspicion for British statesmanship, and Pitt achieved a 
temporary diplomatic triumph by forming in that year, 1788, the Triple 
Alliance with Prussia — now under a new king, Frederick William II., since 
Frederick II. died in 1786 — and Holland. The primary end secured was 




Map of Europe, 1 789-1 794. 



BETWEEN THE WARS 713 

the establishment of the supremacy in Holland of the Stadtholder William of 
Orange, with whose house Great Britain had always remained in alliance, 
whereas the republican and anti-Orange party habitually leaned to France. 

The restored prestige of Great Britain was presently decisively asserted 
in a quarrel with Spain, which laid claim to Nootka Sound on the west 
coast of North America, where there was a British settlement. The 
Spaniards took possession and seized the British settlers, on the ground 
that Spaniards not British had discovered the country. Pitt replied that the 
claim to possession rested not on discovery but on occupation, and prepared 
to back the argument with a fleet. Spain appealed to France, but France, 
already in the throes of the Revolution, declined to intervene ; and by the 
Convention of 1791 Spain surrendered completely. In another direction, 




r jWuV .fcim. *» 



TAMim oF'USHREW: SLadwrni «c 



'ffj ^ThMoiern,Quko&& ,.<rr^^t v~ u*#w - 



Pitt averting the partition of Turkey by Catherine of Russia. 
[A caricature of 1791.] 

however, Pitt met with a defeat. He viewed with alarm the aggressive 
policy of the Russian Tsarina Catherine, who was already scheming for the 
absorption not only of Poland but also of Turkish dominions, which would 
establish Russia as a maritime power on the Mediterranean. Chatham at 
an earlier stage had favoured the progress of Russia as a Power which 
could be called in to counteract Bourbon ascendency on the Continent ; 
while to Burke and Fox, as to later English Liberalism when it was 
dominated by Mr. Gladstone, the suppression of the Turk appeared to be 
far from undesirable. With Pitt began that attitude of suspicious hostility 
towards Russia which so largely dominated British foreign policy at most 
periods of the nineteenth century. But Pitt found himself unsupported by 
public opinion ; having threatened war, he was obliged to draw back. At 
the Peace of Jassy Catherine obtained her immediate desire by securing 
the line of the Dniester ; and Frederick William of Prussia, who had 
expected to check her advance by British aid, began instead to seek the 



7H THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

Tsarina's friendship, looking upon Pitt as a broken reed. The result was 
shortly afterwards shown in a fresh dismemberment of Poland. 

In the four years, however, from the beginning of 1789 to the close of 
1792, the French Revolution and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy were 
totally subverting the whole European system. France was the type 
of an absolute monarchy associated with a completely exclusive aristocracy, 
entirely dominant over bourgeoisie and peasantry who bore the whole 
burden of taxation without having any voice in the government. The 
burden of the taxation was cruel, and the finances of the country had been 
reduced to utter chaos by a century of costly and perpetual wars. There 
was no civilised country where the u Rights of Man " were less regarded 
in practice. But in theory the Rights of Man were regarded with enthusi- 
astic admiration. French thinkers and writers had pointed out, sometimes 
with scathing ridicule, sometimes with remorseless logic, and sometimes 
with sentimental rhetoric, the iniquities and follies of the existing system, 
and had contrasted them soberly with the infinitely more equitable govern- 
ment of Great Britain or picturesquely with the ideal life of an imaginary 
Golden Age before man had learnt to tyrannise over man. French aristo- 
crats made much of the heroes of liberty who set America free from British 
tyranny ; some of them magnificently gave their swords to serve the same 
cause ; and at last, when French finances were persistently going from 
bad to worse, the advisers of Louis XVI. bethought themselves of summon- 
ing the States General, the assembly of the Three Estates of noblesse, 
clergy, and commons, which had not been called together since the early 
years of the seventeenth century. 

The States General were brought together in May 1789, when the 
Third Estate, supported by a few of the clergy and a few of the nobility, 
promptly asserted itself. At the outset it seemed that there was going to be 
a constitutional revolt against privilege and absolutism. Everywhere the 
souls of lovers of liberty rejoiced when the populace of Paris pulled down 
the Bastille, the emblem of arbitrary power. Monarchs and aristocrats, 
however, took alarm at the idea of the subject masses laying claim to 
political rights and repudiating their subjection. British respectability 
reproved but on the whole did not condemn a praiseworthy if ill-regulated 
effort to follow the paths of constitutionalism along which the British nation 
had already advanced with so much conscious rectitude. It was not long, 
however, before Edmund Burke, with more penetration, was denouncing 
the proceedings of the French as an attack upon every conservative 
principle, destructive of all the ideas upon which the framework of society 
rested. In England constitutionalism had been an orderly development, a 
steady growth, rooted always in the same principles. Progress had been 
made not by introducing innovations but by closing the door to reactionary 
innovations, by a process of adaptation to changing conditions. France 
was setting herself to cut down the system which had developed naturally, 
and to substitute a brand new logical system wholly unrelated to the 



BETWEEN THE WARS 715 

existing conditions. The inevitable result would be first a hideous anarchy 
and then a military despotism. In English democrats, however, the first 
stages of the French Revolution inspired no such terrors. In their eyes 
there was room for a good deal of reform even in the sacred British 
constitution, in which privilege still played far too large a part, and popular 
rights were scandalously repressed. 

The French Revolution was a war upon privilege. As it went forward 
it became more and more violent, more and more destructive of everything 
which could preserve a society that assumed distinctions of rank to be the 
first fundamental condition of public order and decency. In England itself, 
in the lower social strata, men were already 
beginning to feel the pinch of the rural 
and industrial revolutions that were going 
on. The aggregate of wealth was increasing 
rapidly, but the area of its distribution was 
becoming more and more restricted. The 
agricultural and industrial output was ex- 
panding, while the amount of labour em- 
ployed on it was diminishing, and the 
population was multiplying rapidly. The 
superabundant supply of labour was driving 
wages below the subsistence level ; and for 
this state of things men found the cause 
not in the economic but in the social 
conditions. There were not wanting those 
who persuaded themselves that the remedy 
was to be sought in a political reconstruction, of which France was setting 
the example. 

In 1789 the States General, converted into a National Assembly, made 
a clean sweep of feudal privileges. Then it set to work to invent a new 
constitution. There was a considerable exodus of the nobility, and then 
in 179 1 Louis attempted flight. His departure was detected, and he was 
brought back to Paris from the frontier ; but France believed that he had 
been on his way to make an appeal to his brother monarchs to restore the 
French monarchy by force of arms. A corresponding interpretation was 
placed upon the attitude of the King of Prussia and the Austrian Emperor, 
with the result that early in 1792 Louis was compelled to declare war 
upon Austria. 

Thus began the European conflagration, for which, in the first instance, 
France had two distinct motives. The first was national resentment at the 
interference of a foreign Power in France's conduct of her own private 
affairs, and the second was the revival of the old idea of Louis XIV. that 
France was entitled to extend her borders to her a natural boundaries," the 
Rhine and the Alps. But by this time the French monarchy was already 
doomed, and very shortly a third motive was added — that of extending 




Edmund Burke. 
[After ths portrait by Romney.] 



716 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

"liberty" to all the peoples of Europe, who were ready to burst the bonds 
of monarchical and aristocratic dominion. 

In the early months of 1792, Pitt's attitude towards France was still one 
almost of benevolent neutrality. He saw no reason to anticipate that the 
country would be involved in war, and his budget was framed without any 
regard to such a possibility. Leopold of Austria who, during his all too 
brief reign, which was ended by his premature death early in this year 
before the declaration of war by France, had shown himself the most 
practically intelligent statesman in Europe, had declined to yield to the 
clamour of the French emigres or to dictate to France after Louis accepted 
the constitution. Pitt certainly saw no reason for Great Britain to interfere 
on behalf of the French monarchy, especially as the Crown was still 
recognised as an integral part of the constitution. If France chose to 
involve herself in a war with Austria and Prussia, the struggle was not 
likely to last long in view of the chaotic condition of the French govern- 
ment and the French finances, to say nothing of the French army. 
France, in short, might create a great deal of disturbance, but there was 
no reason to be afraid of her aggression. 

The prophets who prophesied her downfall derived support from the 
blunders of her first military movements on the Netherlands frontier, 
followed up by the Prussian declaration of war. Then the effective 
government was captured by the Paris Commune, which was led by the 
extreme revolutionists ; the mob broke into the palace of the Tuileries, and 
the king and the royal family were virtually made prisoners. From the 
frontier came the news that the foreign invaders were on French soil, and 
Paris in a panic massacred a number of " suspects " who were accused of 
treason to the state and of being in league with the alien invader. Terror 
turned to sudden triumph when the attack of the Prussians was repulsed 
at Valmy by Dumouriez, an engagement which inspired a new and in- 
domitable confidence in the patriotic national levies which had gathered to 
hurl defiance at the invader. 

But the " September massacre " had sent a shudder of horror through 
Europe, while the Revolution set the seal upon its defiance of the world by 
making the proclamation of the French Republic the first act of the new 
National Assembly. Though hitherto France had claimed to be acting on 
the defensive against the unwarrantable dictation of foreign Powers, an 
attitude for which she had at least exceedingly strong warrant, she now 
became avowedly aggressive. The new Republic openly asserted its right 
to absorb Savoy and Belgium, and to carry its frontier to the " natural 
boundary." It proclaimed itself the friend and ally of every people which 
desired freedom, the enemy of all monarchies. It asserted its right to 
ignore existing treaties, and its intention of enforcing the opening of the 
navigation of the Scheldt, in defiance of the guarantees given by Great 
Britain as well as by other Powers ; and in the terrible phrase of Danton, it 
resolved to " fling before the kings of Europe the head of a king as the 



BETWEEN THE WARS 717 

gage oi battle." Before the year was out " Louis Capet " was brought to 
trial for his life ; within a month his head fell beneath the guillotine. But 
before that, war with Britain had already become a certainty. France 
had assumed an impossibly dictatorial attitude to the courts of Europe, 
setting at nought all the rules of diplomatic intercourse ; and Britain was 
pledged up to the hilt to oppose the opening of the Scheldt even at the 
cost of war. In January 1793 war was declared. 



Ill 
INDIA AND CANADA 

The coalition ministry of 1783 was dismissed in consequence of the 
battle over Fox's India Bill ; it followed that a new India Bill was 
almost the first measure of Pitt's government when he was returned to 
power with a substantial majority behind him. Chatham, Clive, and 
Warren Hastings had all been disposed in favour of an assumption of 
complete control by the Crown ; but it was not easy to reconcile such a 
scheme with the vested interests of the East India Company. Fox's bill 
had proposed to reduce the company's authority to a minimum, placing 
the control even of trade in the hands of a commission chosen by the 
legislature. The bill had aroused intense opposition, partly because it 
brushed aside the chartered rights of the company, partly because 
the arrangement of its details was expected to be utilised in such 
a manner as to give the then existing Government a permanent control 
not only over the government of India but over the imperial parliament. 
The new bill was one of those compromises in which the British consti- 
tution is so rich, illogical and unsymmetrical but workable in practice 
through its indefiniteness and elasticity. 

There were three powers concerned — the executive government on 
the spot in India, the East India Company itself, and the imperial 
government. The first essential was that the government on the spot 
should be able to act with a free hand according to the exigencies which 
it had to face, without being tied and bound by instructions from a body 
which, in the nature of the case, could not be fully informed of the 
circumstances, seeing that a full twelve-month was bound to pass between 
the sending of a despatch from India and the receipt of a reply from 
London. But, secondly, the Indian government could not be allowed to 
become an irresponsible autocracy ; it must be ultimately responsible to 
the imperial government, which must approve beforehand the general lines 
of the policy to be followed, and must be able to penalise any unwarrant- 
able departure from those general lines. In the third place, the power of 
the imperial government must be reconciled with the chartered rights of 
the company. 



71 8 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

The system now established remained in force for almost three- 
quarters of a century, and was brought to an end only in 1858 with the 
disappearance of the East India Company and the transfer of the govern- 
ment to the Crown. A strong executive government in India was wholly 
incompatible with the system created by Lord North's Regulating Act. 
Under the new system each of the three Presidencies was to have its own 
governor, its own commander-in-chief, and two other members of the 
governor's council ; but since the governor had a casting vote, he could 
get his own way unless he stood alone in the council. But the governor 
and the council of Bengal were also to exercise a controlling authority 

over the other two Presidencies, while the 
governor was to be Governor-General of 
India, or rather of the British dominions 
in India. Further, under special circum- 
stances the Governor-General had power 
to act without consulting his council. In 
the next place the India House, that is the 
management of the East India Company 
in London, retained their authority to lay 
down general directions for policy and 
their general powers of patronage and 
appointment. But these powers were sub- 
ject to the supervision and approval of 
a Ministerial Board of Control, whose 
members were appointed by the Govern- 
ment of the day, and whose president 
was a member of the ministry, this body 
having access to all correspondence. The 
principal direct restriction on the powers of the Governor-General was 
that he was forbidden to make compromising alliances without authority 
from home, while indirectly he would render himself liable to censure 
and recall if he departed from instructions without reasonable justification. 

Warren Hastings left India in 1785 on the completion of his term of 
office which had been once renewed. He was soon attacked by the 
leaders of the Opposition, the three principal charges against him being 
the affairs of the Rohilla War, the Rajah of Benares, and the Oudh 
Begums, though there were many others as well. At first it appeared 
that the Government would support him, since whatever might be thought 
about the Rohilla War his conduct on that matter had already been 
judged and condoned ; for it had preceded his appointment as Governor- 
General, and that appointment had afterwards been renewed. But Pitt 
withdrew his support on the Benares question, which had arisen during 
Hastings's final term of office, and in respect of which Pitt judged that 
his demands on the rajah had been excessive and had been enforced 
with unjustifiable tyranny. The result was that the great Governor- 




"Blood on Thunder." 

[A caricature of 1788 by Giilray of Warren 
Hastings.] 



BETWEEN THE WARS 719 

General was impeached, and he himself was held up to obloquy and 
execration by the most brilliant orators of the day. The impeachment 
opened in 1788, and dragged on for seven years, during which the public 
inteiest dwindled; and ultimately Hastings was unanimously acquitted by 
the peers on every one of the charges, though it was not till some years 
later that the East India Company offered a tardy recognition of the 
immense services which he had rendered. 

The first Governor-General appointed under the new system was 
Cornwallis, a man of tried capacity and of the highest integrity, too strong 
and too universally respected to fear the attacks of interest or of malignity. 
The appointment exemplified the principle generally adopted, that the 
Governor-General's council should be men of direct experience in Indian 
affairs, but that the Governor-General himself should have been trained in 
other fields. 

Cornwallis arrived in India in the autumn of 1786, fully resolved to 
have nothing to do with designs of aggression and to devote himself to 
organisation and retrenchment. In the interval the government had been 
efficiently conducted by an experienced Indian official, Sir John Macpherson. 
But Cornwallis very soon found, like most of his successors, that expansion 
was forced upon him, however little it might be to his liking. In India 
there was not as in Europe a long established system of states with fairly 
defined territories. For centuries every dynasty, wherever it had reigned, 
justified its own existence by expansion and conquest ; it was assumed 
that a power which did not seek to make itself feared abstained from doing 
so only on account of conscious weakness. If the British chose to remain 
quiescent, one or another of the native powers would take advantage of that 
quiescence to develop an aggressive policy. Aggression could not be met 
by mere resistance, however effective ; it must be directly penalised by 
loss of territory. If the defeat of the aggressor brought no worse penalty 
than a return to the status quo, the aggression was quite certain to be 
renewed ; the moderation of the victor would be construed as weakness, as 
a recognition of the strength of the defeated power ; and neutral on- 
lookers would be converted into allies of the aggressor. 

The aggressor at this time was Tippu Sultan, of Mysore, the son and 
successor of the great Haidar Ali. There is no doubt that he was aiming 
at the acquisition of a complete supremacy in Southern India, and that he 
regarded the expulsion of the British as a necessary part of his programme. 
Cornwallis found himself compelled by an old treaty to promise aid to the 
Nizam for the recovery of certain districts which had been filched from 
him by Haidar. But Cornwallis would do nothing more than carry out 
the treaty obligation ; he would not take the initiative and attack Tippu 
himself. Nor did Tippu wait to be attacked. He wanted Travancore, a 
district at the south of India which was under British protection. He 
marched into Travancore an army which was repulsed, whereupon he 
collected a very much larger force. Cornwallis had no alternative but to 



7 2o THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

strike. Three campaigns were needed before Tippu was reduced to 
submission, although the Nizam and the Puna Marathas played at helping 
the British, while both of them were in correspondence with Tippu himself. 
The general result was that Tippu was deprived of about half his 
territories, and the districts ceded were divided not unequally between the 

Marathas, the Nizam, and the 
British. 

Cornwallis established the 
prestige of the British arms, and, 
not without reluctance, but as a 
necessity forced upon him by 
the conditions, added to the terri- 
tory under direct control of the 
British. But his most important 
achievements were in the field of 
administrative organisation. He 
was not a statesman of supreme 
genius, with an intuitive power 
of getting straight to the heart 
of every problem that presented 
itself, and he did not perfect an 
ideal system. But he was intel- 
lectually clear-headed, trained in 
affairs and in the knowledge of 
men, broad-minded and free from 
stereotyped views. Morally he 
was absolutely straightforward, 
fearless and disinterested, and he 
was thorough. Fortunately for 
himself and for India, the general 
confidence in him was so complete 
that all attempts to hamper or 
challenge his freedom of action recoiled on the heads of those who made 
them. Consequently the mistakes he made were those of a sensible man 
under conditions which forced him to act upon data which were inevitably 
incomplete and in some degree unintelligible. 

The arrangement most definitely associated with his memory is the 
" permanent settlement " of the land system in Bengal. The main source 
of the Bengal revenue as of Indian revenues generally was the tax upon 
land. Now under the old Mogul system the districts had been farmed out 
to individuals called zemindars, who were responsible for paying the land 
tax while they were left to collect it for themselves. As long as they 
paid the taxes no questions were likely to be asked as to the amount 
they collected or how they collected it ; and these zemindaris tended to 
become hereditary — that is, when a zemindar died, his son was usually 




Tippu Sultan, of Mysore. 
[From an Oriental painting at Apsley House.] 



BETWEEN THE WARS 721 

confirmed in succession to the office. Misled by the analogy of Western 
ideas and practice, the British government in Bengal supposed the zemindars 
to be in practically the same position as great English landowners. They 
were taken to be the proprietors of the soil from whom the population of 
cultivators held it as tenants. An assessment therefore was made of the 
land ; on the basis of that assessment the amount of the tax was perma- 
nently fixed ; and the zemindar was established on what was virtually the 
same footing as that of the landowner in England. He had security of 
tenure, power of alienation, and 
reaped the whole benefits of all im- 
provements, whereas heretofore he 
had lacked security, and had been 
tempted to reap all that he could as 
quickly as he could without con- 
sideration of the remote future. The 
weak points of the system were two : 
first, from the government point of 
view, that a settlement for a long 
term would have given the zemindar 
all the security that he needed, while 
leaving the government free to re- 
vise the assessment at the end of 
the term, to its own advantage. In 
the second place, it was not realised 
that the zemindar had not in fact 
been the proprietor of the soil, which 
properly belonged to the peasants 
or " ryots," who cultivated it. At 
the same time, while the system was 
actually a new one instead of being 
as was supposed an adaptation of the old one, it was in practice a great 
improvement upon the prevailing methods. Experience showed where 
its weaknesses lay, and in other parts of India settlements were carried out 
at later times in closer accord with native conceptions. 

Probably, however, the most valuable feature of Cornwallis's Governor- 
Generalship was that .his personal prestige and authority enabled him to do 
what his predecessors had attempted in vain. He resolutely set his face 
against the abuse of patronage, and he finally enforced the payment to the 
company's servants of adequate salaries which freed them from the almost 
irresistible temptation to enrich themselves by illicit methods ; and he thus 
transformed the Indian service from one of the most corrupt into one of 
the most incorruptible that history has known. Cornwallis retired at the 
end of 1793, and was succeeded by an experienced Indian official, Sir John 
Shore, who afterwards became Lord Teignmouth. 

The American War had severed the thirteen colonies from Great Britain, 

2 Z 




Lord Cornwallis. 



722 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

and they were thenceforth established as the United States. But Canada, 
Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia remained under the 
British flag. In the United States there were great numbers of loyalists, 
known during the war as Tories, who refused entirely to acquiesce in sever- 
ance from the British Empire. They resented the republican government, 
which, in its turn, looked upon them as traitors to the national cause. 
Rather than accept the new conditions large numbers of these " United 
Empire Loyalists " left their property and their homes and migrated across 
the northern border, where they were welcomed by the British govern- 
ment, and were planted chiefly in Upper Canada and in New Brunswick. 
This immigration of a large British element changed the conditions of a 
colony which had hitherto been practically French in race, in tradition, and 
in custom, and Roman Catholic in religion. This led to the Canada Act 
of 179 1, whereby Upper Canada or Ontario was made a separate colony. 
Lower Canada or Quebec retained its French characteristics, while the 
consequent peculiarities of its government and administration were not 
applied to Ontario. Upper and Lower Canada had each its own governor 
and legislature, while each had its own tradition of hostility to the newly 
born republic on the south. But in each case the self-government of the 
colony was on the old lines ; that is to say, the executive was in the hands of 
the governor and his council, who were free from control by the legislature 
just as the administration in England had been independent of parlia- 
mentary control before the revolution of 1688. The legislatures themselves 
consisted of two chambers, one elective, corresponding to the British House 
of Commons, the other nominated, corresponding to the British House of 
Peers. In due time, but not yet, the battle was to be fought out which 
ended in making the executive responsible to the legislature, or, in other 
words, establishing party government. 

These years witnessed also the first step to that expansion in another 
quarter of the globe which was to be Britain's compensation for the loss 
of the better half of North America. Although Spain had taken possession 
of the Philippines and the Dutch were in occupation of the great archi- 
pelago known as the Spice Islands, there had been no organised explora- 
tion, still less any settlement, in the Southern Pacific, until in 1768 Captain 
Cook began his series of voyages. Having surveyed the eastern coast of 
Australia, Cook, in 1770, proclaimed the British sovereignty of that region, 
to which he gave the name of New South Wales ; but still the formal pro- 
clamation was not followed by effective occupation. There was, in fact, 
no particular inclination to seek for colonial expansion, since it was now 
the general belief that colonies were merely a temporary acquisition, which 
in the course of time would naturally sever themselves from the empire. 
But it was very soon found that the loss of the American colonies had one 
decidedly embarrassing result. For more than a century convicted criminals 
had been transported to those colonies to pay for their misdeeds by servi- 
tude. The government wanted some new region to which it could trans- 



BETWEEN THE WARS 723 

port its convicts. In 1783 it was suggested that Cook's formal annexation 
of Australia, not yet made internationally effective by occupation, should 
be followed up by planting a convict settlement on the Australian coast. 
Accordingly in 1787 an expedition was despatched, carrying seven hundred 
and fifty convicts together with a detachment of marines, and Captain 
Philip as governor. In January 1788 the expedition landed at Botany 
Bay, though the settlement was immediately transferred to the more con- 
venient position which was named Sydney after one of the Secretaries of 
State. Six days after the British occupation French ships appeared ; it is 
possible that, if Captain Philip's arrival had been delayed for a week, France, 
not Britain, would have annexed Australia. 



CHAPTER XXX 

THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC AND THE 
UNION WITH IRELAND 

I 

THE FIRST STAGE 

War was declared between Great Britain and France on February i, 
1793. This first war was brought to a close by that suspension of hostili- 
ties which is called the "Peace of Amiens," in 1802. Primarily it was a 
war against an aggressive France which, with the cap of Liberty on its 
head, was reviving the pretensions of the most ambitious and the most 
absolute of its monarchs to dictate to Europe and to tear up treaties. It 
could not lose that character while the policy of the French government 
was persistently aggressive, and it remained aggressive from beginning to 
end. On the other hand, public opinion supported and urged on the war 
because public opinion conceived an intense and ineradicable terror, not 
so much of France as of the French Revolution. While at first the revolu- 
tion had excited a considerable amount of sympathy, the proclamation of 
the republic, the beheading of King Louis, and the subsequent reign of 
terror in France produced an immense reaction of sentiment, for which 
the way had been prepared by the eloquent denunciations of Burke, whose 
prophecies concerning its course were repeatedly justified by literal fulfil- 
ment. Those who believed that fundamentally the cause of the Revolution 
was the cause not of anarchy but of liberty, that the Revolution was driven 
to its excesses not by its inherent character but because foreign interven- 
tion had brought it to bay and forced it to fight savagely for its life, 
persistently denounced the war as essentially unnecessary, unjust, and re- 
actionary; while the country, thoroughly convinced that the Revolution 
must be fought to the last gasp, regarded them as traitors. Great Britain, 
hitherto far in advance of the rest of Europe in the doctrine and practice 
of political liberty, was nevertheless the most determined in its resistance 
to revolutionary France, and the downfall of England became a primary 
aim of the man who concentrated France in himself. 

The course and the meaning of the war will be followed more easily 
if we have before us a sort of ground plan of controlling events. In the 
last days of September 1792 France had declared herself a republic. 
During the next three months the republican government proclaimed itself 

the enemy of monarchies at large, being already at open war with Austria, 

724 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 725 

Prussia, and Sardinia, because the appropriation of Savoy was a part of the 
programme of securing the natural boundaries. The French armies, after 
the turn of the tide at the cannonade of Valmy, made continuous progress. 
At the end of January Louis was guillotined, and immediately afterwards 
Great Britain was added to the hostile belligerent powers. Until mid- 
summer there was a struggle for supremacy in the French Assembly 
between the orthodox literary republicans — the Girondins — and the ex- 
tremists of the " Mountain." The Girondins were beaten, and the control 
passed to the body called the Committee of Public Safety, which was com- 
posed entirely of extremists, among whom the greatest man, Danton, very 
soon became a suspect on account of his counsels of comparative modera- 
tion. From October 1793 to June 1794 the reign of terror was in full 
operation, and the tumbrils carried their daily loads of victims to the 
guillotine, beginning with Marie Antoinette and the leading Girondins. 
In course of time the Revolution began to devour its own children ; in 
March the infamous £Iebertists were struck down ; in April Danton fell ; 
and at last, partly in sheer revulsion from the carnage, partly because every 
man felt that unless the thing were peremptorily ended the next turn of 
the wheel might send him to the guillotine, the downfall of Robespierre 
himself and his principal colleagues was compassed. With their fall at the 
end of June the terror came to an end. Fifteen months later, in October 
1795, the new government was formed, known as the Directory, which 
lasted till its overthrow at the end of four years, in November 1799, by the 
coup d'etat of Bonaparte, who established himself as Dictator with the title of 
First Consul. 

It will be seen, then, that the first eighteen months of the war covered the 
period at which the excesses of the Revolution were at their height, and 
produced that indelible impression of the atrocities of Jacobinism which 
made the reaction irresistibly dominant in England. And during this 
same period, when, according to all rational calculations, France ought to 
have been entirely bankrupt, when she should have been utterly 
prostrated by internal dissensions, when her armies ought to have been 
practically impossible to levy or, when levied, to lead, she carried on 
her government, fought with continuous success by land against the 
gathered armies of more than half Europe, and produced mainly from the 
lower social ranks generals of the highest ability — who were seldom given 
the chance of blundering twice, since failure was virtually construed as a 
proof of treachery to the republic. Even before the Directory was 
established two of France's enemies, Prussia and Spain, had withdrawn 
from the European coalition ; and before the end of 1797 the French 
victories on the Continent had broken it up altogether and Great Britain 
was left standing alone. 

Now we have seen that to the very last Pitt had continued firmly con- 
vinced that the British Empire would remain a neutral spectator of the 
events on the Continent. Like Walpole, he had believed that the one 



726 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

fundamental necessity for England was peaceful recuperation and commercial 
development. Like Walpole, he had succeeded in accumulating the sinews 
of war without making any preparation to carry it on should it be forced 
upon him. And, like Walpole, when war was forced upon him he did not 
know how to organise it. But, unlike Walpole, when war came he faced 
it with indomitable resolution, in a high spirit of patriotism which the whole 
nation caught from him, even as it had been inspired with a like spirit by 
his father. In soite of mismanagement, neither Pitt, nor the nation, nor 

the king ever faltered even in the 
darkest hours, nor did the king or 
the nation ever slacken their con- 
fidence in u the pilot who weathered 
the storm." 

Pitt's lead was immediately 
followed by the accession to the 
coalition of Holland and the Bour- 
bon Powers of Spain and Naples. 
Virtually it was only the outer ring 
of the Scandinavian states, Russia 
and Turkey, with the Venetian 
Republic and Portugal, which 
stood aloof. And besides these 
enemies of France outside there 
were still royalist centres in the 
country itself which of necessity 
distracted a share of the French 
government's attention. Until the 
fall of the Girondins in summer, 
there was a check to the successes 
of the French arms which had 
been so marked during the winter. 
But from the time when Carnot on the Committee of Public Safety 
devoted himself to the military administration, he earned his title of 
" Organiser 'of Victory." 

The royalist insurrection in La Vendee was crushed. The Prussians 
and the Austrian and British armies in the Netherlands, after capturing 
Valenciennes and Mainz, failed to co-operate for an effective invasion and 
wasted their opportunities. In the South the royalists at Toulon, sheltered 
by the guns of a British squadron under Admiral Hood, defied the besieging 
forces of the republic until the genius of a young artillery officer, Napoleon 
Buonaparte, devised and executed a movement which made resistance hope- 
less. The royalists were taken on board the British ships, and Toulon 
was abandoned to the republicans. The attacks of Sardinia on the south- 
east, and of Spain on the south-west, were repulsed and followed by counter 
attacks. Austria and Prussia quarrelled over the partition of Poland, instead 




Napoleon Buonaparte. 
[From the unfinished painting by David.] 



» 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 727 

of devoting their attention to the French war ; and along the line of the 
Rhine and in the Netherlands the French, under the command of Jourdan, 
Hoche, and Pichegru, once more drove back the hostile armies. 

Nor did any better success attend the arms of the coalition in 1794. 
Prussia, already threatening to withdraw, was only prevented from doing 
so by a treaty with Great Britain, which paid her a large subsidy for the 
maintenance of sixty thousand men ; and then the Prussian army remained 
persistently inactive, because the whole real interest of the Prussian govern- 
ment was concentrated upon Poland. Before the end of the year the 
British had been driven back out of the 
Netherlands into Holland, and the whole of 
the Austrian and Prussian forces were on the 
further side of the Rhine ; while the French 
were making progress on the Italian side of 
the Alps and the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. 
In one field alone were the allies successful. 
Britain had fully recovered her naval as- 
cendency, although she made nothing like 
a full use of it because of the lack of direc- 
tion at headquarters. There was no organised 
strategical plan. Nevertheless the republican 
government had too much to do on land 
to organise fleets which could hold their 
own against such a commander as Lord 
Howe, whose victory off Ushant on the 
1st of June was the only relieving event of 
the year. The French fleet was conducting 
a convoy of corn-ships to Brest, when 
Howe caught it and shattered it, though the corn-ships made their 
escape. 

British self-respect was saved by Lord Howe's victory, for the British 
performances on land were far from creditable. The Navy preserved the 
great tradition which made it possible, if difficult, for capacity and merit to 
win recognition even in the absence of any very marked aristocratic con- 
nection. But commands in the Army were still an aristocratic preserve 
in which connection outweighed demerit. As a matter of course the chief 
command was given to the king's second son', the Duke of York, who, at the 
head of an army, was thoroughly inefficient, although when he was trans- 
ferred to the administrative control he did very much better work. But 
the fact remained that he was wholly unfitted to cope with generals of the 
order of Jourdan or Pichegru. His incapacity was not redeemed by any 
efficiency in his subordinates, still less in the wholly incompetent military 
administration at home. 

Before the end of 1794 Pichegru had invaded Holland, and had taken 
possession of the Dutch fleet in the Texel. The stadtholder, William, 




" The greatest general of the age — 

General Complaint." 
[From a caricature of 1796 by Woodward.] 



728 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

withdrew to England ; the now dominant republican party in Holland, 
always inclined to France, accepted the French alliance ; and Holland was 
transformed into the Batavian Republic. In April 1795 Prussia deserted 
the coalition and made peace with France by the Treaty of Basle ; Spain 
followed suit in June. But neither Austria nor Great Britain would make 
peace except on condition of the restoration of the Netherlands to Austria. 
The Austrian generals too met with better success, and Pichegru, dis- 
satisfied with the order of things in France, was as inactive as he could 
venture to be. But the establishment of the Directory at the end of the 
year gave France a more stable government, and early in 1796 the 
command of the French armies in the north of Italy was entrusted to 

Buonaparte, to whose services the Directory 
were indebted for the successful coup d'etat 
which had placed them in power. 

The brilliant campaign of the young 
general of six-and-twenty made the French 
complete masters of North Italy before the 
end of the year, and established Buonaparte's 
reputation ; although the invasion of Austria 
by co-operating armies under Jourdan and 
Moreau was foiled by the skill of the Arch- 
duke Charles, who fell upon Jourdan before 
a junction could be effected, and crushed him, 
so that Moreau was also obliged to fall back. 
On the other hand, the British fleet failed 
to accomplish anything of importance. Its 
energies had been dissipated in the futile 
seizure of islands, which were perfectly use- 
less from a military point of view. Admiral 
Hotham, who held the Mediterranean command, was a hopelessly un- 
enterprising person, who, when he caught a French fleet which he ought 
to have annihilated, considered that he had u done very well" in capturing 
a couple of ships, to the intense disgust of Nelson, who was serving under 
him. More ominous, however, was the fact that the Dutch fleet was now 
virtually under French control, though it was not yet able to take the 
seas ; and the further fact that in the late summer Spain entered upon an 
alliance with the French Republic which, therefore, had three fleets at its 
disposal. Hotham, in the Mediterranean, was happily displaced by Admiral 
Jervis ; but the alarm created at headquarters by the transfer of an actual 
preponderance of ships to France caused that great sailor's activities 
to be crippled by instructions that he was to evacuate the Mediterranean 
itself. 

At the turn of the year, then, the danger was grave. Austria had just 
failed in one great effort to recover Lombardy, and was preparing another 
which was to be equally unsuccessful. The Dutch fleet was being made 




' ' A model officer." 
[From Rowlandson's caricature, 1796.] 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 729 

ready in the Texel, and a French fleet was blockaded at Brest ; but the 
Spanish fleet was very much larger than Jervis's squadron at Gibraltar. If 
that fleet succeeded in evading or overwhelming Jervis, a complete disaster 
might easily result. In February, however, that particular question was 
decisively settled. The Spaniards, with twenty-seven sail of the line, sailed 
from Cartagena for Cadiz. On February 14th, Jervis, cruising off Cape St. 
Vincent with fifteen ships of the line, fell in with them. Ten of the 
Spaniards were separated from the rest to leeward, and Jervis sailed down 
to engage the main body. The battle was practically decided by the action 
of Commodore Nelson, who, supported by two other captains, left the 
formal line of battle to engage five of the Spaniards which were endeavour- 
ing to join the leeward division. The 
manoeuvre threw the Spanish line into 
confusion, and the result was a decisive 
victory. Although only four of the enemy's 
ships were taken, the action completely 
demonstrated the utter inefficiency of the 
Spanish Navy. It was made evident that 
this supposed accession of strength to the 
maritime power of France was illusory. 
Nelson's manoeuvre was in contravention 
of orders ; nevertheless it won the hearty 
approval of the admiral, who fully re- 
cognised his subordinate's justification. 
Jervis was rewarded with an earldom and 
the title of St. Vincent, and Nelson was 
gazetted Rear-Admiral. 

Still the danger was not past. It was 
manifest that Britain's power and even her existence depended upon the 
Navy ; and in April the fleet at Spithead mutinied. The men's grievances 
were flagrant and intolerable. They had petitioned for redress and their 
petitions were ignored. The Spithead mutiny was orderly and well or- 
ganised. There was no violence, but the men stood together. The 
justice of their demands was so conspicuous that all were conceded, 
including the removal of officers of whose tyranny they complained. 
The men promptly, returned to their obedience, and there appears to be 
no doubt that they were determined throughout to be perfectly loyal 
though resolute in insisting on the redress of grievances. 

More serious, however, was another mutiny which broke out a month 
later in the squadron at the Nore. Here the ringleaders were men who 
had become imbued with the French revolutionary doctrines ; and while 
these had the upper hand the danger was extreme. The mutiny spread 
through the North Sea fleet, whose duty it was to keep guard over the 
Dutch fleet in the Texel, which was expected to put to sea immediately. All 
but two of the ships deserted and joined the mutineers at the Nore. Still 




Admiral Duncan. 
[After the portrait by Hoppner. ] 



73 o THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

Admiral Duncan with his two ships sailed for the Texel and adopted the 
rather simple device of signalling to an imaginary fleet in the offing, in 
order that the Dutch might believe that the British were present in force. 
Happily, however, they were not ready to come out. Then the loyal 
minority began to get the upper hand among the mutineers ; one ship after 
another returned to its obedience, and the ringleaders were handed over 
to the authorities. The real grievances were remedied, and only eighteen of 
the worst offenders were put to death, the Government recognising that 
the men had been led astray and were honestly repentant of their treason. 

Meanwhile Buonaparte (or Bonaparte, as he 
now spelt his name) had been continuing his 
victorious career, and had extracted from the 
Austrians at Lobau a provisional agreement 
which was in effect ratified by the substantive 
Treaty of Campo Formio in October. Pitt at 
this stage was ready to go great lengths to 
procure a peace. But a change in the per- 
sonnel of the French Directory confirmed in 
power the group most hostile to Britain ; and 
the only terms which the French chose to dis- 
cuss were impossible for British acceptance. 
Negotiations were broken off, and the Dutch 
came out of the Texel only to be decisively 
beaten in an engagement of the traditional 
character at Camperdown by Admiral Duncan. 
There was no doubt about the spirit of the 
fleet when it came to actual fighting. Duncan 
shattered the Dutch fleet, in spite of the 
enemy's obstinate courage, as Jervis had shattered that of Spain. The 
great crisis was over, although Great Britain was formally left in complete 
isolation by the signing of the Treaty of Campo Formio six days after 
Camperdown. 

Some months earlier in the year there had been a serious financial 
crisis in England. There had been a heavy drain upon the supply of gold 
in the country, and a run upon the Bank of England was threatened. The 
crisis was met by an order suspending cash payments, which was confirmed 
by an Act of Parliament extending it to the close of the war. The loyalty 
and confidence of the mercantile community were displayed by its readi- 
ness to accept the Bank's notes, although they would not be convertible 
into currency until the war was over ; and it is remarkable that even under 
these conditions the value of the Bank paper was scarcely depreciated. 




"Grandfather" George with the 
Princess Charlotte. 

I From a caricature by Woodward, 1796.] 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 731 



II 

THE SECOND STAGE 

A point had now been reached in the war when the French Republic 
had established itself in possession of the natural boundaries of France, 
and, beyond its own borders, had set up in the north of Italy and in 
Holland republics which were virtually dependencies, while Switzerland as 
the " Helvetic Republic " was practically in the same position. Spain was 
the ally of France, as in the days when a Bourbon reigned. The victorious 
General Bonaparte had been careful to avoid humiliating Austria, whose 
friendship he desired, while Prussia had long ceased to be hostile. The one 
remaining enemy recognised was Britain, and the French Directory was 
determined upon her humiliation. What was of more importance than the 
determination of the Directory was the determination of France's most dis- 
tinguished general, of. whom the Directory itself was beginning to stand in 
no little fear ; for he had ignored orders and acted on his own responsibility 
both in campaigning and in negotiating, after a fashion which showed that 
the nominal servant of the state might very soon aim at making himself its 
master. 

Bonaparte was bent on the destruction of England, but Camperdown 
had at any rate deferred the possibility of immediately carrying out the plan 
of sweeping the British Navy off the Channel with the combined fleets of 
France, Spain, and Holland, and flinging an army of invasion upon her 
shores. Ostensibly, however, this was still the scheme which was in pre- 
paration in the winter and spring following the Treaty of Campo Formio. 
Bonaparte was appointed to the command of the army of invasion. Never- 
theless, the scheme which he was revolving in his mind was less obvious 
but more tremendous. He had conceived the idea of an Asiatic conquest 
which should enable him to set out to achieve the empire of the West with 
Asia as his base. The British Empire was already the dominant power in 
India ; in India it should be destroyed, and the way to India lay through 
Egypt. The supreme defect in all Bonaparte's schemes of conquest lay 
in his failure to understand the enormous importance of sea power ; and 
because he did not understand it every one of his schemes for the destruc- 
tion of the British was brought to nought, from his Egyptian expedition to 
his Continental System. 

Bonaparte's plan, then, was to seize upon Egypt and Syria and to make 
them the base for further conquest. The Directory was not ill-pleased at 
the prospect of getting its alarmingly powerful servant out of the way, and 
it readily adopted his plan. The proposal of invading England was 
only a feint. Egypt was the real objective of the Toulon armament, 



732 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

although Egypt was technically a province of the Turkish Empire with 
which France had no quarrel. 

The Navy did not believe that the Toulon fleet was intended for the 
invasion of England, a project which for the time had in fact been 
rendered impracticable. But Nelson was detached by Jervis to take 
charge of it. The expedition succeeded in sailing however before Nelson's 
arrival. Nelson, finding that his prey had escaped and guessing its 




BATTLE OF 

THE NILE 



l ST AUGUST 1798 



"BL AC K - FRENCH SHIPS 
WHITE- E NGLISH SHIPS 



BAY OF 



A B O U K I R 



/aboukir . 



VANGU A R D 



V ! 



BAY OF ABOUKIR . 

SHOWING SITE'OF * 

THE BATTLF 



SCENE OF ACTION 



BAY OF ABOUKIR 





The Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay, August I, 1798. 

destination, made straight for Alexandria ; but Bonaparte took Malta 
en route, so that the British fleet missed the French fleet, reached Alexandria 
before it, found no trace of it, and started again to hunt for the quarry. 
Two days later the French came to Alexandria, the fleets having passed 
each other in hazy weather. Bonaparte landed, and began the subjugation 
of Egypt, which was to be followed by that of Syria, and then by further 
developments. Nelson left Alexandria on July 10th, but after some vain 
searching he got news of the movements of the French, which brought 
him back again, and on August 1st he found the French fleet lying in 
Aboukir Bay. 




HORATIO, VISCOUNT NELSON 
After the painting by Hoppner at St. James's Palace. 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 733 

In each fleet there were thirteen sail of the line, but the French ships 
were bigger and carried a greater weight of metal, besides having four 
frigates to two of Nelson's. The French were lying anchored in line very 
nearly from south to north with shoals on their left when the British came 
down on them with a northerly wind. It was already late in the day, but 
Nelson resolved to fight. Reckoning that where there was room for French 
ships to swing there was room for British ships to sail, his five leading 
ships passed down on the left of the French, between them and the shoals, 
and engaged the van. The rest passed down on the French right and also 
engaged the French van, which was thus crushed by the fire on both sides, 
while the rear was unable to come up to its assistance. The battle raged 
through the night ; the great French flag-ship, the Orient, was blown up ; 
and in the morning the French fleet had ceased to exist. Only two 
vessels escaped ; one besides the Orient was burnt, and nine were captured. 
The battle of the Nile or Aboukir Bay gave the British not a mere 
ascendency in the Mediterranean but control, absolute, unqualified, and 
irresistible. Bonaparte and his army in Egypt were completely cut off 
from all communication with France. The overwhelming supremacy won 
by Hawke thirty-nine years before at Quiberon was at last completely 
restored by Nelson's victory of the Nile. 

To that victory must also be attributed the formation of the second 
European coalition against France. Moderation on the part of France 
might have kept Europe acquiescent in the arrangements established by 
the Treaty of Campo Formio ; but early in 1798 she took aggressive 
action against the Papal States, and added a Roman Republic to those 
which she had already established in Northern Italy. The Tsarina 
Catherine of Russia, intent on her own designs in the East, had stood 
aloof from the complications of Western Europe, though favourably dis- 
posed towards France, because French activity was conveniently embar- 
rassing to her own neighbours Prussia and Austria. But Catherine died 
at the end of 1796, and the new Tsar Paul I. hated the French Revolution 
and looked askance upon the multiplication of republics. He was further 
excited by the French seizure of Malta when Bonaparte was on his way to 
Egypt ; for Malta was the stronghold of the ancient Order of the Knights 
of St. John, whom he regarded as being under his special protection. 
Even at an earlier stage, when the British fleets had mutinied at the Nore, 
he had shown his friendliness to Britain by detaining a Russian squadron 
in British waters to give help until the mutiny should be over. Now he 
began actively to negotiate for a new coalition, and encouraged the Sultan 
of Turkey to declare war upon France in consequence of Bonaparte's un- 
warrantable intrusion in Egypt. Pitt eagerly associated himself with the 
Tsar. Naples was threatened by the French aggression in Italy ; and 
after the battle of the Nile the presence of Nelson with his fleet on the 
Italian coast encouraged the king and queen of Naples to make war upon 
France — a short war, which resulted in the ejection of the monarchs 



734 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

from Naples and the establishment there of another republic called the 
rt Parthenopean " ; it did not however extend over Sicily. A treaty at the 
close of the year allied Britain with Russia, Turkey, and Naples. Two 
months later Austria, which had been haggling over terms, joined the new 
coalition. 

Bonaparte, though isolated in Egypt, did not abate his designs. He 
opened a correspondence with Tippu Sultan of Mysore, and having estab- 
lished his own government in Egypt, marched into Syria. But before he 
could follow the example of Alexander the Great and plunge into Asia, it 
was necessary to secure the port of Acre, which would otherwise be a gate- 
way through which hostile armies could be poured upon his rear. But 
Acre defied him. Sir Sidney Smith, in command of the British squadron 
in the Levant, intercepted the siege materials which he was endeavouring to 
obtain from France, and the stronghold could only be invested on the land 
side. British sailors took vigorous part in the Turkish governor's stubborn 
defence; by the end of May Bonaparte had to retire foiled, with no 
alternative but to fall back upon'Egypt. There he received news which 
decided him that the time had come when he should leave Egypt and 
return to France to seize the supreme control of the state. With a few 
comrades he slipped away from Egypt, evaded hostile ships, and landed 
in France. At the end of the year the Directory was overthrown and 
Bonaparte was proclaimed First Consul, which meant that for practical 
purposes he was the absolute ruler of the nominal republic. 

Meanwhile general success had at first attended the arms of the coalition. 
A Russian army entered Italy under the command of Suvarov. The French 
met with crushing defeats and were all but cleared out of the country. A 
British expedition against Holland under the command of the Duke of 
York captured the Dutch fleet in the Texel. 

The royalists at Naples succeeded in restoring the Bourbon monarchy 
with help from Nelson, in circumstances for which he has been severely and 
justifiably blamed, since the restoration was accompanied by a savagely 
vindictive punishment of the rebels. But the tide turned. The British in 
the Low Countries met with some reverses, and were forced to a capitulation 
under which they retired themselves and released some thousands of French 
and Dutch prisoners, although the captured fleet which had been carried 
to Yarmouth was retained. The Austrians and the Russians quarrelled. 
Massena in Switzerland inflicted a decisive defeat on the second Russian 
army under Korsakof, and before the year was over Russia in dudgeon 
withdrew from the coalition. 

Bonaparte, who, long before he assumed the title of Emperor, began 
to use his first name Napoleon, made overtures for a general peace ; but 
he offended diplomatic susceptibilities by addressing himself directly to the 
king of England. Had there been any mutual confidence, Fox and his 
followers would have been fully justified in their contention that there was 
now an opportunity for a lasting settlement ; but there was at least ample 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 735 

justification for lack of confidence in the French professions, which were 
interpreted as having no other object than that of gaining time for the 
organisation of further aggressive designs. On the other hand, the tone of 
the British in the negotiations revived the popular hostility in France, 
which had been diminishing. Austria saw no prospect of terms which 
would satisfy her, the negotiations fell through, and the war continued. 

Another Italian campaign conducted by Napoleon ended triumphantly 
in the victory of Marengo, which in effect paralysed Austria. Again 
negotiations were opened ; the French attempt to treat separately with 
Austria and with Britain failed, and then Napoleon tried to obtain an 
armistice, naval as well as military. This did not suit Pitt, since it would 
have enabled the French to send supplies to Egypt and to Malta, which 
was now being blockaded. The negotiations broke down, Malta was taken, 
but when hostilities were renewed between France and Austria a quite 
decisive victory was won by Moreau at Hohenlinden. Napoleon was able 
to dictate his own terms to Austria, and the Treaty of Luneville once again 
left Great Britain isolated. 

The isolation was the more serious because the Tsar Paul had com- 
pletely changed his front. If he hated the Revolution he had discovered in 
Bonaparte an incarnation of the principles of absolutism entirely admirable. 
He was already angry with Austria, and angry with England for standing by 
her. When the second coalition was formed, it was understood that if the 
British fleets captured Malta the island would pass practically under his pro- 
tection ; but since his withdrawal that was no longer to be expected. He 
was dreaming of a conquest of India, and he revived the old grievance of 
the Baltic Powers that the British interpretation of maritime law was destruc- 
tive of neutral trade. France, it is true, was not more careful of the rights 
of neutrals when they clashed with her own interests, but the British fleet 
could enforce the views of the British government, while the French fleet 
was practically inoperative ; so Paul now proposed to revive the Armed 
Neutrality. The treaty of the Baltic Powers was signed in December. 

The British answer was decisive. There had been no positive act of 
war on the part of the Baltic Powers, but it was scarcely possible to wait 
while they were arranging to place their fleets at the service of France. A 
fleet was despatched to coerce the Danes, Nelson being second in command 
with Sir Hyde Parker as his chief. Nelson forced his way into the harbour 
of Copenhagen, where, after a furious engagement in which he ignored the 
admiral's signal to retire, the Danes were forced to submission and sur- 
rendered their fleet to the British. The Swedes had no inclination to 
meet with similar treatment, and the assassination of the Tsar placed on the 
Russian throne the young prince Alexander I., who was completely out of 
sympathy with his father's policy and very soon made terms with the 
British. 

Ten days before the battle of the Baltic a decisive blow was struck 
against the French army of occupation in Egypt ; Sir Ralph Abercrombie 



736 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

landed at Aboukir on March 21, and routed the French. Although the 
gallant general himself was killed, the French troops were shut up in 
Alexandria, while a Turkish army was besieging Cairo, which was taken in 
June. Reinforcements from India joined the British force, and Alexandria 
surrendered in August. The French troops were allowed to return to 
France, but their ships remained in possession of the victors. 

While Bonaparte was scheming for the conquest of India, the British 
ascendency there was confirmed, and the British dominion extended by 
the Governor-General, Lord Mornington, better known as the Marquess 
Wellesley, the elder brother of the still more famous Duke of Wellington. 
The rule of Sir John Shore, the successor of Cornwallis, was deficient in 
firmness, and the native powers, especially Mysore, were developing hopes 
of overthrowing the British, when Mornington arrived in India just as 
Bonaparte was preparing to sail for Egypt. Tippu, the Bhonsla, and 
Sindhia all had forces under French officers ; and Tippu at least was 




Seringa patam, Tippu's capital, stormed in I799- 
[Taken from a view in Home's " Mysore," Madras, 1794.] 

in active correspondence with the French commandant at Mauritius. 
Mornington acted promptly. He applied immediate pressure to the Nizam, 
who dismissed his French officers and accepted in place of the force which 
had been maintained a British contingent — that is to say, a sepoy army with 
British officers — theoretically for the defence of his dominions against the 
aggression of native powers ; for the maintenance of which force he ceded 
territory, a system known as that of " subsidiary alliances." Similar pressure 
was brought to bear upon Sindhia, and then Mornington proceeded against 
Tippu. 

It must be remembered that Tippu's father had usurped the sovereignty 
of Mysore not forty years before, and that Tippu himself was a fanatical 
Mohammedan ruling by the sword over subjects who were for the most 
part Hindus. The war with Tippu was emphatically a war with a dynasty, 
not with a state ; and it was necessitated by the plain fact that Tippu was 
in alliance with France for the purpose of destroying the British power. 
Tippu rejected the British ultimatum, and in 1799 the British troops 
stormed Seringapatam. The Sultan himself was killed. Mornington re- 
instated the representative of the previous Hindu dynasty as lord of the old 
Mysore territory, and annexed the rest of Tippu's dominion, though a 



THE WAR WITH THE REPUBLIC 737 

portion was restored to the Nizam. These districts, however, were re- 
troceded by him for the permanent maintenance of the protecting British 
contingent. 

The fall of Alexandria was the last phase of the active hostilities. The 
British were ready enough for peace if they could have it with security ; 
Napoleon wanted it, we are entitled to believe, in order to organise the 
isolation and coercion of the British, since it was clear enough that as 
matters stood coercion was not likely to be effective. The preliminaries of 
peace were agreed upon in October, but the British Government was no 
longer that of Pitt, who had resigned office in March. The battle of the 
Baltic was actually fought under the auspices of the Addington administra- 
tion. Pitt had carried the Treaty of Union with Ireland, but the king's flat 
refusal to agree to Catholic Emancipation, to which Pitt and some of his 
colleagues were absolutely pledged as an accompaniment of the Union, 
compelled the minister and some of his supporters to resign. The change 
of ministry did not involve transfer of power to the Opposition ; it merely 
meant that Pitt and the colleagues who were pledged to Catholic Emancipa- 
tion gave a qualified support from outside to their former colleagues, who 
remained in office with some new associates. The authority and capacity 
of the new ministry was seriously diminished by the withdrawals ; but as 
the Rockinghams thirty-five years before would have preferred to remain 
under the leadership of the elder Pitt, so the Addington ministry now 
would have preferred to remain under the leadership of the younger. The 
Addington ministry made the peace which became definitive as the Treaty 
of Amiens in March 1802, but barely two years elapsed before Pitt was 
recalled to the helm. 

The treaty embodied the belief of Pitt himself and of some but by no 
means all of his former colleagues that the need for war was over, that 
France and Europe had learnt their lesson, and that a time of general peace 
and recuperation was at hand. Concession, therefore, was carried so far 
that Britain agreed to restore all her conquests with the exception of Ceylon 
and Trinidad. In these restitutions was included that of Cape Colony to 
the Dutch ; it had been ceded by the Stadtholder to prevent its seizure by 
the French, after his retreat from Holland, but before his government had 
been technically set aside, and the British had taken possession after a formal 
show of resistance on the part of the Dutch colonists. It was to be re- 
occupied later and to remain a permanent British possession. But even 
before the Treaty of Amiens was signed, it was becoming evident that the 
peace had in it no element of permanence. The joy with which it was 
hailed in England was premature. , 



3 A 



738 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 



III 

IRELAND AND THE UNION 

Ireland had achieved legislative independence with the constitution of 
1782, confirmed by the Renunciatory Act of the following year. She had 
refused to surrender any portion of that independence even as the price of 
the final removal of hampering commercial restrictions. She had asserted 
it again very emphatically at the time of the Regency Bill, when the Irish 
parliament, led by Grattan, refused to recognise the right of the parliament 
at Westminster to control the regency for Ireland, and sent a deputation to 
London to offer the regency to the Prince of Wales on its own account — 
a proceeding of which the effectiveness was somewhat damaged by the 
fact that by the time the deputation reached London the king had been 
restored to health and there was no regency to offer. The prosperity of 
the country advanced rapidly during the years of peace, since the conces- 
sions already made greatly extended Irish commerce ; the paralysis of the 
Catholic population had at least been diminished by the relaxation of the 
Penal Code ; the spirit of hopefulness stimulated enterprise, and agriculture 
assumed a new activity. 

But an independent parliament could be regarded only as a first step 
towards the reform of flagrant abuses which powerful interests were still 
energetic in preserving. The executive was still responsible to the Crown, 
not to parliament ; parliament itself was infinitely less representative of the 
actual electorate and more subject to the control of corrupt influences 
than even the parliament at Westminster ; and on religious grounds the 
electorate itself was restricted to the Protestant community, who formed 
less than a fourth of the population, while the Protestant dissenters were 
in a worse position than their brethren in England. 

The Irish parliament then was in effect controlled by the group whose 
interest it was to preserve an unreformed representation, while those who 
desired reform were in disagreement on the Catholic question. This con- 
trolling majority was thoroughly loyal to the British connection ; but the 
guarantee of their loyalty was their firm conviction that the Protestant 
ascendency, their own ascendency, rested upon British support. Had 
Grattan been the leader of a majority the loyalty of the parliament would 
hardly have been less, for Grattan had a splendid faith in mutual trust and 
honour as the curative for misunderstandings. For such mutual trust 
he pleaded earnestly, and on the same principles he desired to place his 
Catholic fellow-countrymen on the same footing as the Protestants, and to 
trust in the loyalty which the Catholic gentry had already displayed so con- 
spicuously. Had the Catholic gentry been freely admitted to public life, 
it is certain that they would have proved themselves worthy of the confi- 



THE UNION WITH IRELAND 739 

dence reposed in them. In short, a reformed Irish parliament would in a\i 
probability have been a loyal parliament. But the one reform which was 
conceded, pressed upon the ascendency party by Pitt, and accepted by it 
not without reluctance, was not calculated to improve the position. In 
1792 the franchise was extended so as to admit Catholics to the electorate, 
but they were still excluded from parliament and from office. In other 
words, the leaders were kept out of active public life and distrusted, while 
the rank and file were admitted to the franchise. 

This measure came just before the declaration of war between France 
and Great Britain, when the Revolution in France was already unmistak- 
ably triumphant, and the French Revolution, following upon the American 
Revolution, had sown dangerous seed in Ireland. For there a fruitful soil 
was provided among the Protestant dissenters with their Puritan tradition, 
the Catholic proletariat with its ill-defined but acute consciousness of 
oppression, and an agrarian population which, whether Protestant or 
Catholic, had a lively Sense of hostility to the landlords and still more to 
the middlemen — a chain of whom was generally interposed between the 
absentee landlords and tenantry. It was to this community of interests 
hostile to the existing order that the young lawyer Wolfe Tone appealed 
when he started the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791. 

Wolfe Tone himself was imbued with many of the ideas of the French 
Revolution, and his own ultimate aim was to create an Irish republic. But 
these aims were not yet to be acknowledged. The first thing was to get 
rid of dissension and unite the Irish people in a demand for the redress of 
grievances. The time had not yet come for treating the British connection 
as the root cause of the grievances. The Protestant population were to 
combine with the Catholics in a demand for full political rights irrespec- 
tive of religion, and the Society of the United Irishmen, with its starting- 
point among the Protestants of Ulster, virtually leagued itself with the 
" Catholic Committee," which had been in existence for more than thirty 
years. That committee had already changed its character, having become 
democratised by the secession from it of many Catholics who had taken 
alarm at the anti-clerical aspects of the French Revolution. On the other 
hand, while the active propaganda of the new movement was accompanied 
by an increase of agrarian disturbance, it intensified also the repressive 
activities of the ascendency party which dominated both parliament and 
the executive. 

In 1795 a new viceroy, Lord Fitzwilliam, realised the essential justice 
of the Catholic demands, and reform seemed to be at hand ; but the 
ascendency group, led by the Chancellor Fitzgibbon, proved too strong 
for him. Fitzwilliam was recalled, Fitzgibbon was made Earl of Clare, 
and in his hands the new viceroy, Lord Camden, virtually placed himself. 
And now a fresh element of chaos was introduced by a revival of religious 
animosities. The Protestants associated with the United Irish Movement 
were in the main, though not exclusively, Presbyterians. But in the 



740 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

popular terminology of the day, Protestants meant the preponderant body 
who belonged to the Established Church and were free from political 
disabilities. These Ulster Protestants formed the opposition societies 
called the " Peep o' Day Boys," a name which gave place to that of 
" Orangemen " in commemoration of William of Orange. For the past 
four years the Peep o' Day Boys had been in frequent collision with the 
supporters of the United Irishmen ; and now the Orange society developed 
a sort of crusade against the Catholic peasantry, with the result that large 
numbers all over Ireland began to enroll themselves in the Society of 
United Irishmen, which welcomed them with open arms. 

Nevertheless, Catholic Ireland was not at this time ripe for rebellion, 
though Wolfe Tone imagined that it was. He betook himself to France, 
dropped the mask, and had no difficulty in persuading the French govern- 
ment to despatch a large expedition under the command of Hoche to land 
in Ireland. It was the moment when British naval ascendency was still in 
the balance, just before Jervis's victory at Cape St. Vincent. The expedition 
did not land ; it was driven off by tempests. But it is remarkable that when 
its arrival was hourly expected there was no sign of a rising in Ireland itself. 

Still, through 1797, while the religious strife raged chiefly in Ulster, 
the organisers of rebellion were arming and drilling constantly increasing 
numbers of the Catholic peasantry. On the other hand, the Government 
adopted vigorous repressive measures for the seizure of arms and the 
insurrectionary ringleaders ; and this work was done chiefly by the Ulster 
yeomanry, who were in fact Orange volunteers imbued with the passions of 
the religious strife. All the progress towards harmony, of which there had 
seemed to be such high promise when Grattan's parliament was created, was 
done away with, and all the old animosities were again raised to their 
highest pitch. The unrestrained brutalities of the government soldiery 
were answered by deeds of corresponding savagery. There was no one to 
control, to organise, or to restrain the insurrectionary movement, because 
the Government had seized its chiefs; and in May 1798 a desperate but 
abortive rebellion blazed out in the counties of Wicklow and Wexford, 
where the struggle was practically between Catholics and Protestants 
without qualification. 

The suppression of the insurrection was secured by the decisive defeat 
of the insurgents at Vinegar Hill ; and the fortunate appointment of Corn- 
wallis,the former Governor-General of India,as Lord-Lieutenant, insured that 
so far as lay in his power the final suppression of the rebellion would be 
conducted as leniently as possible. But the whole episode was made 
hideous by barbarous conduct on both sides, though it was accompanied by 
redeeming deeds of heroic courage. Nor was it possible even for Corn- 
wallis to prevent continued excesses on the part of the side which had won. 
And Grattan's parliament had failed so utterly to fulfil Grattan's own hopes, 
it had become so completely the instrument of the oligarchy, that Grattan 
himself had seceded from it in despair. 



THE UNION WITH IRELAND 741 

One more incident of the rebellion is to be noted. France did not 
repeat the attempt of 1796, and Bonaparte was absorbed in the Egyptian 
expedition. Nevertheless a small French force was landed in the west; its 
leader, General Humbert, scattered a large force of militia which was de- 
spatched against him, at what was called the " Race of Castlebar," and he 
was able to give a good deal of trouble before he was finally forced to 
surrender. But practically outside the counties of Wicklow and Wexford 
the insurrection never made head. 

The conclusion forced upon Cornwallis in Ireland and upon Pitt in 
England was that the sister island would never have a healthy government 
except through an incorporating union with Great Britain. The complete 
absorption of power by the Irish oligarchy, their provocative oppression 
before the rebellion, and their tyrannous abuse of their position when it 
was over, were condemned by Cornwallis in the strongest terms, though 
perhaps his condemnation was more inclusive and more sweeping than the 
circumstances altogether warranted. But the outstanding fact remained 
that government by the oligarchy was intolerable, and would inevitably 
keep the country in a state of seething sedition. On the other hand, if the 
very much larger subject population were admitted to political equality, 
they in their turn would be overwhelmingly predominant, and would show 
very little mercy in penalising their former rulers for all the misdeeds of 
the past. An incorporating union would give the control to the parliament 
at Westminster, which could deal out even-handed justice, since it would 
be dominated by neither of the Irish parties ; and at the same time there 
would be no Nationalist grievance, because Ireland would stand on the 
same footing in the Imperial parliament as England and Scotland — a very 
different thing from the state of affairs before 1782, when a British parlia- 
ment in which Ireland was unrepresented actively controlled the govern- 
ment of Ireland. An incorporating union therefore was the condition 
without which it was vain to hope for a loyal and peaceful Ireland. 

But neither Pitt nor Cornwallis imagined that a union would of itself 
suffice to make Ireland peaceful and loyal. There was in any case the 
initial difficulty that the Irish Nationalist sentiment was as strong as it had 
been in Scotland at the beginning of the century. The majority of Irish- 
men from Grattan himself down believed that the country could work out 
its own salvation under a reformed government ; that is, the leaders of 
Irish opinion believed that if the grievances of the Catholic population were 
removed and the parliament were made truly representative, the vengeful 
spirit would fade, animosities would die down, and Ireland would justify 
the confidence that had been reposed in her. The mere fact that these 
leaders resented the loss of independence made it all the more imperative, 
if Irish loyalty was to be attained, that a union should be accompanied by 
the decisive removal of grievances. The fatal defect of the Union was that 
Pitt, aware of this necessity, allowed it to be understood in Ireland that the 
Act of Union would be accompanied by the removal of the acknowledged 



742 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

grievances, without himself taking steps to make the reforms an integral 
part of the Union. And when the Union had been carried, the English 
minister found himself brought up against the blank wall of the king's abso- 
lute refusal to remedy the grievances of the Catholics. Pitt and others 
salved their consciences by resignation, but that was the end. Pitt gave the 
king his promise not to raise the question again, and he returned to office 
when his presence was again imperatively needed at the helm, without 
making the fulfilment of his pledges a condition. 

The proposal for an incorporating union was approved by large majori- 
ties at Westminster, but was virtually defeated — that is, it was passed by a 
majority of only one — in the Irish House of Commons when introduced in 
1799 by Lord Castlereagh, who was chief secretary to Cornwallis. But 
Pitt, bent on the measure, decided that the assent of the Irish parliament 
must be obtained at whatever cost. Cornwallis, the most straightforward 
of statesmen, certainly believed that he had authority to obtain the support 
of Catholic opinion by at least implying that the religious grievance would 
be removed. But the vital matter was to procure a majority in parliament. 
Pitt and his most effective agent, Castlereagh, were entirely opposed to 
testing public opinion by a general election. The simpler plan was 
followed of applying a vigorous and unqualified corruption to convert 
opponents of the measure into friends. Peerages, places, and pensions 
were lavishly promised or scattered ; there may not have been bribery in 
the most literal sense, but every man who had his price obtained it. In 
the year 1800 the Acts of Union were passed both by the British and Irish 
parliaments, and in 1801 the first parliament of the United Kingdom of 
Great Britain and Ireland met at Westminster. 

The Act united the legislatures, giving Ireland one hundred repre- 
sentatives ; the Irish peers elected twenty-eight representatives of their 
number to sit in the House of Lords, while those who were excluded 
from that chamber were eligible to the House of Commons for any 
English or Scottish constituencies ; and Ireland was to contribute two- 
seventeenths to the imperial revenue. But she still remained with a 
separate administration and a separate judicial system, with her effective 
government controlled by the viceroy, who himself continued to be in- 
fluenced mainly by the ascendency party ; and if she was at last and 
decisively freed from all commercial restrictions and placed on the same 
footing as the sister island, the pledges to the Catholics were ignored, 
and their grievances, with those of the Protestant dissenters, remained 
unremedied. As for the reform of representation, that could hardly 
have been carried out without corresponding reforms in England, where 
the fear of the French Revolution, of Jacobinism and anarchy, deferred 
any such measure for a generation. 






CHAPTER XXXI 

THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 



I 

THE BLACK SHADOW AND TRAFALGAR 

The British people were anxious for peace, anxious to believe that a 
durable peace was possible. It accepted the Treaty of Amiens with satis- 
faction, willing to surrender very much for the sake of a general pacification. 
But Grenville and others of Pitt's former 
colleagues looked askance, mistrusting the 
First Consul, who, they believed, would 
merely make use of the peace in order to 
strengthen his own position and that of 
France, and then turn upon Great Britain. 
The omens which had even preceded the 
ratification of the treaty were verified by the 
further consolidation of the French ascen- 
dency in the lately created republics out- 
side the French frontiers, and in the First 
Consul's assumption of authority in dealing 
with the minor German states. The French 
ascendency was used to enforce the exclusion 
of British goods from the ports of the depen- 
dents of France. French agents for com- 
mercial purposes visited Ireland and made 
themselves familiar with British ports ; the 
commercial character of the agents was more than dubious. An official 
" commercial " report regarding Egypt was much more concerned with 
the facilities for reconquest than with its ostensible subject. 

Protest on the part of Great Britain as to the actions of the Republic 
on the Continent were in effect met by saying that they were none of 
England's business ; and by angry complaints that the French emigres 
were allowed scandalously to traduce the First Consul in the British Press, 
and that the British were abstaining from their obligation under the Treaty 
of Amiens to evacuate Malta. There was some technical warrant for 
Napoleon's attitude, but it was no less evident that he was violating 
the understandings upon which the treaty had been made. In plain terms 

743 




George III. 
[After the painting by Sir William Beechey. j 



744 THE ERA 0F REVOLUTIONS 

it was soon impossible to doubt that Napoleon was determined to rule 
Britain out of all voice in European affairs, to ruin her commerce by 
a policy of exclusion, and to enforce her submission by war if she refused 
it on any other terms. The price was more than she chose to pay. 
Reluctantly but with grim resolution the country made up its mind to 
a combat a outrance, in which it very soon felt itself to be fighting not only 
for its own existence but for the liberties of Europe dominated by the will 
of a military despot. Fourteen months after the Treaty of Amiens war 
was once more declared between France and the British Empire, a war 
in which there was no longer any pretence that France was the champion 
of liberty, equality, and fraternity; it was a war for the destruction of the 
British Empire, and its vindictive character was signalised at the outset 
by the First Consul's decree for the immediate arrest and detention as 
prisoners of war of all British subjects then travelling in France. 

Now there was only one possible method by which Great Britain, single- 
handed, could strike at France, and that was by crippling her marine and 
destroying her seaborne commerce. The invasion of France by a British 
army was unthinkable. There were two methods by which France with or 
without allies could seek to strike at Britain, invasion and the destruction 
of her commerce by its exclusion from Europe. For two years and a half 
both plans were in operation, until invasion was made once for all impossible 
by Nelson's last victory of Trafalgar, which therefore terminates the first 
phase of the war. But Napoleon had not yet learnt, nor did he ever 
learn, the inherent futility of attempting to annihilate British commerce 
without destroying the British naval supremacy ; because that supremacy 
gave her in effect a complete monopoly of the seaborne trade of the world. 
Europe could not do without goods which could only be brought to her 
by British ships. Even if European governments were willing, European 
ports could not be closed so as to block the entry of commodities which 
Europe could not and would not do without. The fact had been illustrated 
during the nine years of the first war, when, as in the Seven Years' War, 
British commerce had persistently expanded. It was to be proved to 
demonstration in the second war, when British commerce continued to 
expand and Europe continued to be flooded with British goods, even after 
there was scarcely a port on the whole European seaboard which was not 
theoretically closed to British merchandise. 

During the first phase of the war then, while the French control of 
ports outside the French dominion was limited, it was palpable that 
British commerce could at the worst be only hampered. The British fleets 
swept the seas with none to say them nay ; and they continued to assert 
the right of search and the inclusive doctrines as to contraband of war 
which had been protested against by the Armed Neutrality in 1780 and in 
1 80 1 as destructive of the legitimate trade of neutrals. Napoleon's grand 
object during this time was to effect an invasion of England, and for two 
years and a half that black shadow hung over the country. Across the 




THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 745 

Channel troops were collected, and flotillas were gathered, to be in readiness to 
embark the troops at a moment's notice and hurl them upon the English shore. 
The project did not alarm the British Admiralty, which was satisfied that 
its own dispositions made invasion impossible. The mastery of the sea was 
secure. Even if the incredible should occur and for a few days there 
should be no force in the Channel to repel invasion, so that the French 
flotillas might succeed in effecting a crossing unmolested, their communica- 
tions would at once be cut and the invading force would soon find itself 
helpless. Napoleon seems to have believed in the possibility of making the 
army of invasion live upon the invaded country. But England would not 
have been easily conquered at a blow ; for besides the regular troops who 
were within the four seas and the partly trained militia, vast numbers of the 
civil population were under arms drilling and train- 
ing as volunteers, w 7 hile it does not appear that 
Napoleon ev2r had more than a hundred thousand 
men, if so many, rcTady for embarkation. So 
while there was no little popular alarm, and the 
coming of " Boney " was awaited with nervous 
anticipation, the Admiralty were under no appre- 
hensions. The fleet in home waters was a more 
than sufficient guard. It was Napoleon's dream 
that the rest of the British fleet might be enticed 
away, and that in its absence French fleets might 
be- so combined as to secure the mastery of the 
Channel at least for a time ; but the dream was 
chimerical, as the event demonstrated. For two 
years French and British lay facing each other on the Channel watching 
and waiting before any further attempt could be made to carry out 
Napoleon's plan, and then it broke down utterly and ruinously. 

Within a few months after the declaration of war, an abortive insur- 
rection in Ireland stirred up by the enthusiast, Robert Emmet, was easily 
suppressed. But the Addington ministry was tottering, and Pitt's re- 
sumption of the leadership was imperatively called for. It was his own 
wish to emphasise the national character of the struggle by forming not a 
party but a national ministry, which should include both Fox, who had 
persistently opposed • the first war, and Grenville, who had opposed the 
peace. Fox, although the king flatly refused to admit him to the ministry, 
urged his own followers to support the Government. Grenville himself 
refused to take office, and after all the strength of Pitt's Cabinet lay entirely 
in Pitt himself. But if his leadership inspired the country with confidence, 
it was nevertheless not to him but to the admirable strategical arrange- 
ments for which the chief credit at the finish was due to Lord Barham at 
the Admiralty, that Great Britain owed her security. The French ports 
were blockaded not in the sense that an attempt was made to keep them 
sealed up, but in the sense that it was hardly possible for any squadron to 



The Double-Headed 
Government. 

[A caricature of the alliance of Pitt 

and Fox, from Jaime's " Musee de la 

Caricature."] 



746 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

put to sea without being detected and overpowered ; and at the same time 
there were complete arrangements for a concentration of forces in case any 
accident should render such a step necessary. Nelson was in charge in 
the Mediterranean ; Admiral Cornwallis, the brother of the Marquess, 
kept watch over Brest ; and it was unlikely that a fleet would get out from 
either Brest or Toulon without being forced to one of the decisive actions 
which were the constant desire of British admirals. 

Pitt, however, was not satisfied with watching and waiting. As before, 
he bent his efforts to the formation of a new coalition. Almost at the 
moment of Pitt's return to office, Europe was standing aghast at the 
murder of the Due d'Enghien, the representative of the junior branch of 
the Bourbons, who had been trapped on German soil, carried over the 
French frontier, and shot after a mock trial by a military commission. Two 
months after the murder Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor, and the 
French Republic was at an end, as it had been in fact if not in name ever 
since Napoleon became First Consul. The crime excited the deep indig- 
nation of the Russian Tsar ; while the proclamation of the new Empire was 
alarming to the head of the historic Holy Roman Empire. The Powers 
began to arm, though Russia was the only one of them which as yet was 
thoroughly determined upon war. Napoleon's ambitions were emphasised 
when the North Italian Republic invited him to become its king and he 
accepted the invitation. The dependent republics were forced to re- 
organise themselves at his dictation. But it was not till April of 1805 that 
Russia and Great Britain formed a definite league to which Austria was 
immediately added ; while Prussia, which hoped to get Hanover from 
Napoleon (who had taken possession of it) as a reward of neutrality, still 
held aloof. On the other hand, Napoleon forced upon Spain a new treaty 
which placed her fleet at his disposal. To all appearance he paid little 
attention to the new coalition, but was engaged upon preparing the stroke 
which was to clear the way for the invasion of England. 

The plan was that Admiral Villeneuve should sail from Toulon, pick up 
Spanish reinforcements, decoy Nelson away to the West Indies and leave 
him there, and then return to co-operate with the Brest fleet in crushing 
Cornwallis and clearing the Channel. Villeneuve succeeded in carrying out 
a part of his programme. He slipped out of Toulon, evaded Nelson, 
attached a Spanish squadron at Cadiz, and made for the West Indies. 
Nelson, after starting on a false scent, went in pursuit, leaving Collingwood 
behind to keep ward over Cadiz. The quarry escaped him, but a swift 
brig carried warning to England ; the Channel fleet was concentrated at 
the west of the Channel, and Calder was detached from Ferrol with thirteen 
ships of the line to deal with Villeneuve, who had twenty. Nelson, mean- 
while, was on his way back to join Collingwood's squadron at Cadiz. Calder 
found Villeneuve off Cape Finisterre and engaged him. The battle itself 
was not of a decisive character, but was decisive in its effects, since 
Villeneuve ran for Corunna, and Calder returned to the main fleet, to be 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 747 

court-martialled for having been contented with the capture of two ships. 
By this time Nelson had already joined Collingwood; and Napoleon's great 
naval coup was completely brought to nought. Nelson himself returned 
home for a few weeks, while Villeneuve gave up all idea of raising the 
blockade of Brest, and turned his attentions towards Cadiz. Calder's 
action was fought on July 22nd. On August 15th Villeneuve sailed 




Lord Nelson. 
[From the painting by Sir William Beechey, R.A. ] 

from Corunna for Cadiz, and on September 29th Nelson rejoined 
Collingwood. 

Stirred by bitter taunts flung at him by the Emperor, Villeneuve put 
to sea with thirty-three ships of the line, French and Spanish, and five 
frigates. Nelson, with twenty-seven ships, caught him on October 21st off 
Trafalgar between Cadiz and Gibraltar. Nelson was to windward, with a 
north-west wind to carry him down on the enemy's line, which was heading 
from south to north. As at the Nile, he resolved to use his opportunity to 
annihilate the Franco-Spanish fleet in spite of its superior numbers. The 



74 8 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

method of the attack was unusual but decisive. Nelson's fleet bore down 
in two parallel lines, headed by Nelson himself and by Collingwood, almost 
at right angles to the French line, which was pierced at two points. The 
van was cut off and kept out of action, while the centre and rear were 
shattered by Nelson and Collingwood, every ship being taken or destroyed. 
Even the van could not escape completely, since four of them were taken 

besides the eighteen prizes secured 
in the main action. The victory 
was absolutely overwhelming. The 
British supremacy had never in 
fact been seriously endangered for 
a moment since the battle of 
Camperdown ; the work had been 
completed by Nelson in the bay 
of Aboukir. Trafalgar made an 
end of all serious resistance to the 
British monopoly of the seas. It 
was the last real naval action of 
the war, because after it there was 
no navy to fight. Nevertheless the 
victory was dearly bought at the 
price of the death of him who by 
universal assent is accounted the 
greatest sea-captain that the world 
has known. Nelson's career of 
glory had reached its glorious 
close. 

The triumph of Trafalgar dis- 
persed once for all that shadow 
of invasion which had hung over 
England. But Napoleon, the world 
at large, even perhaps Britain her- 
self, were made blind to its de- 
cisiveness by the crushing of the 
European coalition at Austerlitz. When Villeneuve sailed from Corunna 
for Cadiz instead of for Brest, the Emperor of the French saw that his 
dream of an invasion of England had melted into air. With character- 
istic promptitude he turned upon the foes who were slowly gathering 
against him in the east. The Austrians had massed an advance army 
at Ulm. The Russian armies were still far away. The German prin- 
cipalities which lay between the French frontier and Ulm were already 
virtually under Napoleon's heel. He poured his armies through their 
territories, swooped upon Ulm, and compelled the whole Austrian force 
there to capitulate on the day before Trafalgar was fought. 

The way lay open to Vienna, which was soon occupied ; but the 




Admiral Lord Collingwood. 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 749 

Russians were now advancing, and the rest of the Austrian army, which 
had fallen back, moved to join them. On December 2nd, at Austerlitz, 
Napoleon won what was perhaps the most brilliant of all his victories over 
the combination of Russians and Austrians. The Russians retreated ; 
the Austrian resistance was annihilated. Prussia, which had just resolved 
to join the coalition, returned to its attitude of neutrality, and Napoleon's 
triumph on the Continent was complete. " Roll up that map of Europe," 
said Pitt; "it will not be wanted again for ten years." His own end was 




Formidable 



e 



T/ SH FLEET 







<* 



VICE-ADMIRAL COLLIN6WOO0 



BuCENTAURC '■ 



CADIZ 



miTisn f 5.^^, 





Prince dcs Astorias 



The Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805. 

very near. On January 23, 1806, three months and two days after 
Trafalgar, the great English statesman, whose last years had been devoted 
to the struggle with France, followed to the grave the great English sailor 
who had struck for Britain the decisive blow in the struggle. 



II 



THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM 



The death of Pitt necessitated the formation of a new ministry on the 
lines which Pitt himself had desired when he took office for the last time. 



750 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

The king himself could no longer resist the inclusion of Fox in a National 
government. Grenville was the head of the " Ministry of all the Talents." 
But eight months after his great rival Fox too died. In these last months 
of his life he saw secured one great reform upon which his heart had long 
been set. The resolutions demanding the abolition of the slave trade 
were at last carried in both Houses, though the consequent Act was not 
passed until Fox had disappeared from the scene. But Fox learnt in office 
the vanity of his persistent hope and belief that a durable peace could be 
made with Napoleon. The Emperor had no objection to negotiations, but 
he had no intention of being baulked or hampered in carrying out the 
smallest fragment of his ambitious designs. From Austerlitz onwards, 
through 1806 at least, Napoleon's career was one of steady and successful 
aggression with only one unimportant check. Prussia very soon accepted 
his conditions and closed her ports to British trade, getting Hanover as her 
reward. The Bourbon dynasty was again driven out of Naples and re- 
tained only the island of Sicily under British protection. The mainland 
was made a kingdom for Napoleon's brother Joseph ; Holland with enlarged 
borders was made a kingdom for another brother, Louis. The Rhine states 
of the Empire were formed into the Confederation of the Rhine, with duchies 
and principalities distributed among Napoleon's marshals. The Holy 
Roman Empire was formally dissolved ; the Austrian Emperor was the 
Austrian Emperor and nothing more. The king of Prussia at last awoke 
to the fact that the French Emperor was playing with him ; too late 
he challenged his mighty adversary, and in October Prussia was brought 
completely under Napoleon's heel by the victories of Jena and Auerstadt. 
Frederick William had to fall back upon Russian support. 

The negotiations with Fox broke down over the English minister's 
refusal to cede Sicily or to desert the Tsar. But the Ministry of all the 
Talents, failing through no fault of its own to procure an honourable peace, 
did not understand the conduct of war. It clung to the old tradition of 
sending here and there desultory expeditions with no chance of accom- 
plishing permanent results. Thus it sent to Southern Italy a force under 
General Stuart, who won at Maida a victory over a superior force of French 
veterans, which somewhat raised the prestige of British troops and lowered 
that of the French ; but the success was not followed up and the expedition 
was withdrawn. Another expedition sent to Buenos Ayres by way of 
striking a blow at the Spanish government in South America ended in igno- 
minious disaster in 1807. The one distinctive gain to the British Empire 
in 1806 was the effective re-occupation of Cape Colony, which Fox re- 
fused to surrender. 

Six months after Fox's death the Grenville ministry resigned, in 
March 1807, on a constitutional question. Defeated by the king's rejection 
of a proposal to admit Roman Catholics to commissions in the Army and 
Navy, it formally refused the king's demand that it should pledge itself 
not to raise the question again. Resolutions declaring the right of the 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 751 

ministry to tender advice at its own discretion were shelved, the ministry 
resigned, and reactionary Toryism was established in power for twenty 
years. During those twenty years the strifes and divisions, as under the 
long Whig ascendency of the last century, were not strifes of party principle 
but of antagonistic personalities. But the events of 1806 had the effect of 
removing the last shred of doubt that the struggle with Napoleon would have 
to be fought out to the bitter end, and also of bringing home a new conviction 
that Napoleon was not to be defeated by the old system of alliances with 
continental dynasties. Pitt had grasped the fact before his death. Dynastic 
interests would never form a solid ground for a combination which could 
hold Napoleon permanently in check. Napoleon meant to be master of 
Europe, and only when nations, not dynasties, rose against the oppressor 
would combinations be effective. To national uprisings Britain would 
give her hearty support, but she would no longer devote herself to forming 
coalitions of the old type. 

Already, in 1806, Napoleon struck the first blow which was intended 
to bring the " nation of shopkeepers " to its knees. When after Jena 
Napoleon conducted his triumphal progress through Prussia to Berlin, 
he issued from the Prussian capital the Berlin Decree which was to 
annihilate British commerce. Every port in every dependent state and in 
every state in alliance with France was to be closed to British goods. It 
was tolerably apparent that every state which did not so close its ports 
would very soon be treated by France as an enemy. The British Govern- 
ment responded with the Orders in Council, declaring all ports so closed to 
be in a state of blockade, and therefore not open to any commerce at all. 
Further Napoleonic decrees were met by further Orders in Council of the 
same drastic type. British action was of course represented as having for 
its purpose the destruction of all neutral commerce and the appropriation 
of the trade of the world. That was very nearly the effect, but it was not 
the intention. The Orders in Council were measures of war. The conquest 
was a plain trial of strength. If Europe could preserve her commerce 
while excluding the British at the dictation of Napoleon, the British Empire 
would be ruined ; if she could not, the British Empire would not be ruined ; 
but European commerce would, and Europe would feel that she owed her 
woes to the dictatorship of Napoleon. The commercial war would be a 
means to excite Europe to shake itself free from the Napoleonic yoke. 

Early in 1807 Napoleon received a check from the Russians in alliance 
with the Prussian king at the battle of Eylau ; but four months later he 
won a decisive victory at Friedland, which, with other circumstances, caused 
the Tsar to change his policy. Alexander was angry with Britain, which, 
owing chiefly to inefficiency in the administration, had failed to send him 
the support he expected. His alliance with Prussia, now absolutely at 
Napoleon's mercy, was of no use to him. The two Emperors met and 
held a secret conclave on a raft in midstream at Tilsit, where they made 
a compact under which the Tsar was to unite with his new ally in com- 



75 2 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

pelling the still neutral minor states to close their ports, while his own 
were also to be closed, to the British. Prussia was shorn of its western 
territories, out of which a kingdom of Westphalia was patched up for 
still another of Napoleon's brothers, Jerome, while her annexations 
in Poland were taken away and converted into the grand duchy of 

Warsaw. 

George Canning, however, received in- 
formation of the secret articles of the treaty ; 
he had become Foreign Secretary on the 
fall of the Grenville ministry. Although it 
was impossible to produce any public justi- 
fication, he promptly despatched an expedi- 
tion to Denmark, offering her the British 
alliance, and demanding as on the previous 
occasion that she should surrender her fleet 
into British keeping. It was the obvious 
intention of the new alliance to absorb all 
the European fleets ; and, in view of the 
danger, Canning had no hesitation in ignor- 
ing customary rules. Denmark refused. 
Copenhagen was bombarded ; Denmark 
yielded, and her fleet was carried off. It 
may be doubted whether Britain had any- 
thing serious to fear from any possible com- 
bination of foreign navies, and whether she 
did not rather lose by making Danish senti- 
ment bitterly hostile and by violating the 
accepted conventions which are called the 
Public Law of Europe. But the danger 
was there, and Canning's action put an end 
to it. 

Napoleon, like Canning himself, certainly 
believed that the high-handed action of the 
British minister had gone far to foil his plans ; for his indignation 
was genuine, and was certainly not in fact based, as he professed, on 
his respect for the Public Law of Europe, which he only recognised 
himself when it suited him. His denunciations were made scarcely more 
convincing by the coercion which he applied to Portugal to bring it 
within the ring-fence of his Continental System, the name he gave to the 
scheme for the exclusion of British commerce. A French army under 
Junot marched into Portugal ; but the royal family, instead of submitting 
to Napoleon, embarked upon British ships and betook itself to the great 
Portuguese colony of Brazil. Canning's coercion of Denmark, though it 
failed to bring about the alliance with the Northern Powers for which he 
had hoped, had the very clear justification that it might at least be regarded 




The Emperor Napoleon. 
[From the painting by Delaroche. ] 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 753 

as a necessary act of self-defence. It was not possible to apply a similar 
defence to Napoleon's seizure of Portugal. 

Before the end of the year, then, Russia had declared war upon Britain, 
and there was scarcely a free port left along the whole European coastline 
from which British goods were not excluded. It is an ironical commentary 
on Napoleon's programme that he found himself obliged to grant licences 
to purchase and sell British goods, both manufactures and raw materials, 
which the Continent could not produce out of its own resources ; while 
smuggling, if a dangerous business, became both a very extensive and a 
very lucrative one. 

The seizure of Portugal, where Junot very soon set aside the Portuguese 
government and took over the administration, was the first step towards 
the opening of an entirely new phase in the war. It is probable that 
Napoleon was already resolved to annex Spain as well as Portugal to the 
French Empire. The royal family of Spain played into his hands. The 
king, Charles IV., the qaeen, the heir-apparent Ferdinand, and the minister 
Godoy, formed perhaps a group as despicable as any which ever held in 
its hands the government of a great nation. The Crown Prince and the 
minister, the queen's favourite, were very much at feud. Both parties 
intrigued with the French Emperor, who found in the Portuguese troubles 
a sufficient excuse for throwing French troops into Spain. These were at 
first rather welcomed by the populace, who imagined that they had come 
to take the part of Ferdinand, who was popular simply for the reason that 
Godoy was detested. But Napoleon enticed both the king and his son 
over the border to Bayonne, where both became parties to a compact by 
which both king and prince abdicated the Spanish throne ; whereupon 
Napoleon proclaimed his own brother Joseph king of Spain, transferring 
him thither from Naples, while he passed on the crown of Naples to his 
brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. 

It was a simple and easy bargain, but it left out of count the possibility 
that the Spanish people might have something to say. They had. They 
regarded Joseph Bonaparte as a usurper and Ferdinand's abdication as 
having been extorted from him by force. In every province the people 
rose in arms, and committees called juntas were formed to conduct resist- 
ance to the usurper. Before the end of July a considerable French force 
was compelled to capitulate to the insurgents at Baylen. Napoleon dis- 
covered that Spain would have to be conquered before his brother could 
occupy the throne. He did not anticipate much difficulty in the task ; but 
he had never before had to overcome a fiercely hostile people, and he had 
never before had to do battle with an efficient British army. Both those 
experiences were before him now and made havoc of his calculations. 



3 B 



754 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 



III 

THE PENINSULA WAR 

Portugal had palpably and unmistakably been coerced ; the national 
government had in no sense accepted the French supremacy, it had merely 
submitted to irresistibly superior force. As Portugal's ally, Britain had 
full warrant for intervening. Technically the case was different with 
Spain. Formally the Bourbon dynasty had abdicated of its own free will, 
and the new king had been elected by a body masquerading as a national 
assembly. Technically therefore the Spanish insurgents were rebels. But 
this did not prevent the British Government from recognising its oppor- 
tunity and espousing their cause. The capitulation of Baylen gave promise 
that the Spaniards would not collapse, that they were embarking on an 
adventure which was not altogether desperate ; and the rising of the 
Spaniards encouraged the idea of helping Portugal to break from the bonds 
which had just been imposed upon her. The country would be entirely 
friendly, and the British command of the sea secured free entry and un- 
interrupted communication, whereas French armies could only get to 
Portugal through hostile Spanish territory. If Portugal were secured it 
would become a base whence the Spanish insurgents could be supported 
and helped to eject the French. The Peninsula War, which began with the 
landing of British troops in Portugal on August 13, 1808, was a new 
departure. For the first time a British army under a British general was 
about to take the lead in a land war against a European power. Even in 
Marlborough's day that great general's achievements were only in part due 
to the British army. The British did not fight their battles single-handed ; 
but in the Peninsula, although invaluable service was rendered in the war 
by the Spanish guerillas, Wellington's own battles were fought and won 
by British troops who received practically no assistance from the Spanish 
regulars who were acting with them. Hitherto throughout the great 
struggle with France, at any rate for a hundred years, nearly all the British 
honours had fallen to British seamen. Now that there were no honours 
left for British seamen to win, British soldiers took their share, not in 
India and America only but in Europe. 

The British force of twelve thousand men was under the immediate 
command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, as yet known only as a " sepoy general," 
on account of his brilliant services in India during his brother's Governor- 
Generalship, to which we shall presently revert. Reinforcements were 
following under Sir John Moore, but the two commanders were to be sub- 
ordinate to two senior officers, Sir Harry Burrard and Sir Hew Dalrymple, 
when they should arrive in the Peninsula. Wellesley landed at the mouth 
of the Mondego, marched towards Lisbon, and was met by Junot at Vimiero. 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 



7SS 



Junot attacked and was repulsed. Wellesley was confident that, left to 
himself, he could have crushed him. But the pursuit was stopped by the 
arrival of Burrard and Dalrymple in succession. Reinforced by Moore, the 
army continued its march upon Lisbon, and the senior generals agreed to 
the convention of Cintra, which permitted the whole French force to 
evacuate Portugal and to be simply carried back by sea to France in 
British ships ; at the same time a Russian fleet, blockaded in the Tagus, 
was compelled to surrender. British public opinion was enraged at the 
easy terms granted to the French. 
Dalrymple, Burrard, and Wellesley 
were all recalled for an enquiry, 
and the command in Portugal, now 
clear of the French, was left to Sir 
John Moore. Happily the enquiry 
completely cleared Wellesley of 
responsibility for the ..convention 
itself and for the failure to make the 
victory of Vimiero complete, and 
he returned to take up the com- 
mand again in the following spring. 
Meanwhile Napoleon, who was 
as angry with Junot as the British 
were with their generals, resolved 
to carry out the conquest of Spain 
in person. The trouble in Spain, 
in his eyes, was merely an inter- 
ruption to his scheme for dominat- 
ing the rest of Europe, for which 
one decisive campaign would set 
him free. He seemed likely to carry out his programme, for the armies 
of the Spanish insurgents were quickly scattered, and by the end of 
November Joseph Bonaparte was restored to the throne in Madrid. But 
the Emperor's apparently easy triumph was made vain by Sir John Moore's 
brilliant diversion in the North. Marching with twenty thousand men from 
Portugal, he struck at the French line of communication with the Pyrenees. 
Napoleon would not himself wait to crush the audacious Scot, but hurried 
back to France, leaving the operations in Spain to Soult. As Soult advanced, 
Moore retreated. His one object had been to draw off a large French army 
in pursuit, whereby it would become impossible for the French to secure their 
mastery in the South. The move was entirely successful. The retreat to 
the coast, where a British flotilla was to take off the army at Corunna, was 
an operation of extreme difficulty and danger carried out with great skill. 
At the last moment Sir John had to turn at bay at Corunna, where Soult was 
decisively beaten off, and the embarkation was effected. But the battle cost 
England the life of the great soldier, who was buried on the field of victory. 




Sir John Moore. 
[From an engraving after a sketch portrait.] 



y$6 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

Moore's diversion had made it necessary for the French to do the 
business of suppressing Spain all over again. Sundry of Napoleon's 
marshals and a quarter of a million soldiers were left in the Peninsula, but 
Napoleon himself was taken up with other affairs. Austria, calculating that 
any successes would lead to a general German uprising, declared war, and 
the first movements seemed to promise well. But before the anticipated 
uprising took place Napoleon himself was in the field. By the middle of 
May he was in Vienna, and in the first week of July his victory at Wagram, 
although very far from being a crushing one, induced Austria to change her 
policy and in effect to submit. The Treaty of Vienna in October deprived 
her of extensive districts, cutting her off completely from the sea, and 
rewarding Bavaria at her expense. It was followed by a further 
humiliation, since Napoleon demanded and obtained the hand of an 
Austrian princess, Marie Louise, in marriage, divorcing his wife Josephine 
for that purpose. 

Napoleon also in this year, 1810, deposed his brother Louis from the 
throne of Holland, chiefly for resisting the order to exclude British 
commerce, whereby Holland was being ruined. Holland itself and with it 
or after it all the coastal districts of North Germany were incorporated with 
France. But this involved the annexation of Oldenburg, which, for 
personal reasons, deeply offended the Russian Tsar, who had for some time 
past been increasingly irritated by Napoleon's proceedings. In December 
1 810 the Tsar expressed his displeasure by withdrawing from the Con- 
tinental System and opening his ports to British commerce. From that 
time the coercion of Russia became Napoleon's great object, because his 
whole policy for the destruction of England depended upon making the 
Continental System complete. The coercion of Russia took final shape in 
that terrible Moscow expedition of 18 12, which was the beginning of the end 
of Napoleon's power. This sketch has been necessary, in order to explain 
why Napoleon never himself took in hand the business of annihilating the 
British in the Peninsula, but left the work to his marshals — every one of 
whom found Wellington fully his match — while, on the other hand, the fact 
that a quarter of a million men were permanently locked up in Spain 
enormously increased his difficulties when he found himself fighting for 
life after the Moscow disaster. We may now turn to the continuous 
history of the Peninsula War. 

Sir Arthur Wellesley, whom we may for the future refer to by the 
familiar title of Wellington, since he was made Viscount Wellington after 
the battle of Talavera in July of this year, 1809, returned to take the 
supreme command in Portugal in April. He was satisfied that Portugal 
with her mountainous borders could be defended against invaders, while 
his own communications with England were assured by sea. Portugal 
was to be made the base for invading Spain and co-operating with the in- 
surgent armies. The northern line for invasion was commanded on the 
Spanish frontier by the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, the southern by that 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 757 

of Badajoz. The first business was to drive Soult with his army out of 
Northern Portugal, and this was effected in May. The next was to co- 
operate with the Spaniards by invading Spain and marching upon Madrid. 

The Spanish forces were badly directed and badly handled. The British 
general met the French under the command of the Marshals Jourdan and 
Victor at Talavera, and routed them after a hot engagement. The victory 
won Wellington his peerage ; defeat might have wrought the annihilation 
of the British army, as Soult had already reorganised the northern force 
and was threatening the communications with Portugal. But even this 




CI A' ^ rta 



TOULOUSE 

^ ^FRANCE 




£\ 



The Spanish Peninsula showing the area and centres of the War of 180S-1813. 

victory proved only the immense danger of a further advance, and the in- 
efficiency of the Spanish troops. Wellington fell back into Portugal, where 
he spent his time for the next year in organising his army and the great 
system of defence against which the French legions were to be rolled in 
vain. For Wagram set Napoleon free to flood Spain with additional troops, 
and offensive operations were out of the question for Wellington. 

In the eyes of the public, Talavera was the one redeeming feature 
among the events of the year, and that appeared small enough. A great 
battle and a glorious victory are not expected to be the prelude to a re- 
treat, and there were not wanting those who clamoured against the whole 
idea of the Peninsula campaign. Men were inclined to believe that on 



758 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

land Napoleon was invincible, and hitherto the British record had not 
suggested that British armies and British generals were capable of defying 
him. It was to the credit of the strongest members of the Government, 
and of some of the Whigs who were by no means friendly to the Govern- 
ment, that they held doggedly to the war and to the support of Wellington, 
the Whigs being actuated mainly by the principle that we were fighting in 
the Peninsula for the liberty of a nation rightly struggling to be free. 

Public uneasiness too was intensified by the mismanagement in other 
fields. The Government having taken upon itself the heroic burden of 
Portugal also took upon itself to attack France in Holland. The idea in 
itself was perhaps not unsound. The Walcheren expedition, if despatched 
in time, ought to have created a diversion which would have seriously 
complicated the Wagram campaign for Napoleon. But it was hopelessly 
mismanaged. It ought to have been a sudden stroke at Antwerp, but its 
start was delayed, so that the French had time to prepare. The army was 
placed under the incompetent Earl of Chatham, the elder brother of 
William Pitt. The naval force was under Sir Richard Strachan. More 
time was wasted on the quite unnecessary capture of Flushing ; the com- 
manders failed to co-operate, and their blundering is commemorated in the 
popular rhyme — 

" Lord Chatham with his sword drawn 
Was waiting for Sir Richard Strachan. 
Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em, 
Was waiting for the Earl of Chatham." 

Having captured Flushing the force found that Antwerp had been made 
impregnable. It settled down in the Isle of Walcheren without medical 
supplies, and there fell a prey to malaria. The men died like flies, and 
before the end of the year the shattered remnant of a much vaunted expedi- 
tion had to be brought home again. 

At the end of this year the Duke of Portland, the titular head of the 
ministry, resigned, and shortly afterwards died. His resignation had been 
preceded by those of George Canning and Castlereagh, who had quarrelled 
so bitterly over a misunderstanding that they fought a duel, after which it 
was practically impossible for either of them to remain in office. Canning's 
place in the new ministry headed by Perceval was taken by the Marquess 
Wellesley, and young Lord Palmerston joined the government as Secretary 
at War, though without a seat in the Cabinet — an office which he retained 
for the next eighteen years. The changes involved no alteration of 
policy ; even Wellesley's presence in the Cabinet was hardly a stronger 
guarantee of support for his brother at the seat of war than Canning's had 
been. At the end of 1810 the king's brain-malady returned, and conse- 
quently a Regency Bill appointing the Prince of Wales regent with un- 
limited powers was passed in the following year. The situation was 
practically unaffected thereby, for the heir-apparent was no longer, as in 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 759 

1788, intimately associated with the leaders of the Whig party, which was 
now in a hopeless minority. 

In 18 10 Napoleon, annoyed by the continuation of the Peninsula War, 
resolved to sweep away the obstructing British, and sent Massena with a 
Grand Army to carry out the task. Soult mastered the whole of the 
southern province of Spain, Andalusia, with the exception of Cadiz, which 
defied him. Suchet mastered Aragon, and Wellington, with some thirty 
thousand British troops, was intended to be the prey of perhaps the ablest of 
the French marshals with seventy thousand men. Inadequately supported 
with men and money from home in consequence of the Walcheren fiasco, 
the British general could only stand on the defensive, with the additional 
danger before him that Soult from the South might co-operate with 
Massena. From this the jealousies of the French marshals delivered him. 
Massena's advance at first was unchecked. He secured Ciudad Rodrigo 
and Almeida, a strong fortress within the Portuguese frontier. He 
intended to sweep the British into the sea, but Wellington had perfected 
his defensive preparations. At the end of September he met and repulsed 
at Busaco the attack of Massena, who was disappointed by finding that the 
Portuguese troops with his adversary were by no means to be despised. 
But Busaco was merely a check. Wellington fell back into the peninsula 
whereon Lisbon stands. 

Then Massena suddenly found himself confronted by the lines of 
Torres Vedras, and realised that Wellington's engineers had made them 
completely impregnable. Also he found that Wellington had very care- 
fully denuded the whole surrounding country of supplies which, with the 
rural population, had been collected within his lines. For nearly five 
months, from the middle of November, Massena lay powerless to strike, 
with an army gradually famishing and perpetually harassed by the 
Portuguese guerillas. In March he began his retreat, while Soult con- 
fined himself to capturing Badajoz on the south. Wellington followed 
and laid siege to Almeida. Massena, with his weakened army, attempted a 
relief, but was beaten after two days of critical fighting at Fuentes d'Onoro, 
and Almeida was taken, though the garrison broke its way out. 

Within a fortnight Beresford had fought and won the sanguinary 
battle of Albuera in the south. He was attempting to recover Badajoz, 
when Soult attacked hjm with twenty-three thousand men. Of Beresford's 
force only some ten thousand were British troops, and upon them fell nearly 
the whole of the fighting. More than a third of their number fell, but 
Soult was driven off with a loss of six thousand. Wellington, having 
cleared the North, hastened to join Beresford ; but Marmont, who had 
taken Massena's place, combined forces with Soult, and the siege of 
Badajoz had to be abandoned. Wellington made a dash upon Ciudad 
Rodrigo, but Marmont foiled the movement and he had to fall back again 
into Portugal. Apparently he had achieved little enough ; it was still only 
within Portugal that he was master. Nevertheless his operations had 



760 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

served perpetually to relieve the pressure upon the Spanish guerillas, who, 
throughout the war, showed a resourcefulness and a fighting capacity in 
marked contrast to that of the official Spanish troops ; while their 
activities at the same time helped the jealousies of the French marshals to 
prevent the overwhelming concentrations of French troops which might 
have pinned Wellington to Torres Vedras. 

So, at the end of 1811, Wellington had not been driven into the sea, 
though it was still possible to argue with honest conviction that the war 
in the Peninsula was producing no results commensurate with the heavy 
expenditure of blood and treasure. But its justification was near at hand. 
Napoleon was planning his Russian expedition, and, instead of reinforcing 
the army in the Peninsula, he was reducing its numbers in the winter and 
spring in order to strengthen his Grand Army for Moscow. He may 
have been misled too by the successful operations of Suchet in the east of 
Spain. 

Thus at last the time was ripe for Wellington to begin a series of more 




Badajoz and its Citadel from the north bank of the River Guadiana. 
[From a view taken in 1813.] 

actively offensive operations. Suddenly in January he sprang upon Ciudad 
Rodrigo ; Marmont began a movement for its rescue, but not in time to pre- 
vent Wellington from carrying it by assault. Unsuspicious of Wellington's 
designs, Marmont again retired to winter quarters. Again the British 
general struck and struck hard, this time to the southward, falling upon 
Badajoz, which was carried by escalade after furious fighting, in which 
the most desperate courage and determination were displayed both by 
defenders and assailants ; although both here and at Ciudad Rodrigo the 
splendid valour of the British soldiery was marred by the brutal excesses 
in which the troops, which got utterly out of hand, indulged after the 
victory. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz were the gates of Spain. 

Badajoz fell in April. Wellington would probably have been glad to 
tempt Soult into an immediate engagement while his own men were in the 
full tide of confidence gained by their last triumph. But Soult was not to 
be tempted, and Wellington could not leave Badajoz till the fortifications 
had been reinstated. By that time it was becoming imperative that he 
should deal with Marmont in the North, for the Spaniards had failed to 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 761 

carry out the advice given them by the British commander and the 
country was still open. Northward, therefore, he turned, despatching 
General Hill to secure the passage of the Tagus at Almarez — the only line 
by which it was possible to effect a junction with the Northern army. 
Hill's work was admirably done. The position was strongly held by the 
French, but the movement for its capture was skilfully concealed ; it was 
rushed by a brilliant attack, the pontoon bridge was demolished, the 
magazine and stores were destroyed, and the communications between 
Soult and Marmont were completely severed. 

In June the Salamanca campaign opened. The combatants were not 
unequally matched in point either of numbers or of the military genius of 
the commanders. Neither was willing to fight an indecisive battle. It 
was not till the middle of July that the movements of the two armies, each 
endeavouring to secure a decisively superior position in which it could 
compel the other to fight on its own terms, brought on the crisis and the 
actual battle of Salamanca, which was fought on July 22nd. The decisive 
moment came when Marmont attempted to carry out an enveloping 
movement on Wellington's flank, which, if it had been accomplished 
successfully, would have given him a decisive victory. But there was a 
moment when the extending of Marmont's lines opened a gap, and the 
moment was seized by his adversary. Wellington broke the line, cut off 
the centre and the left from the right wing, and rolled them up. Fifteen 
thousand of the French army were killed, wounded, or prisoners. 
Three weeks later Wellington was in Madrid, hailed with frantic joy as 
their saviour by the enthusiastic populace. But even Salamanca did not 
mean that Spain was won ; a concentration of the French armies would 
still bring a greatly superior force against the British. Before the end of 
the year Wellington was once more behind the Portuguese frontier. The 
decisive blow was still deferred. 

Meanwhile, the ministry at home had again been modified. Early in 
the year Wellesley, dissatisfied with the treatment meted out both to him- 
self and to his brother, resigned, and Castlereagh took his place as Foreign 
Secretary. Then in May the Prime Minister Perceval was assassinated by 
a lunatic, and his place at the head of the ministry was taken by Lord 
Liverpool, a man somewhat of the Pelham type, not a distinguished 
statesman but endowed with an abnormal capacity for reconciling hostile 
elements. Wellesley would not return to the ministry, and there was not 
room in one Cabinet for George Canning as well as Castlereagh. Castle- 
reagh, however, was no less determined than Wellesley himself to carry the 
struggle with Napoleon in general, and in the Peninsula in particular, to a 
decisive conclusion. 

While Wellington and Marmont were manoeuvring for the mastery 
before Salamanca, Napoleon was launching his expedition against Russia. 
Both Prussia and Austria found discretion the better part of valour and 
stood nominally as his allies, his troops being given free passage through 



762 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

the Prussian territories. At the end of June the Grand Army entered 
Russian Poland, where it was generally welcomed by the Poles. But 
the Russians played the Fabian game, retreating before the half 
million men whom Napoleon was leading. Not till September did they 
stay to give battle, when they faced the Emperor at Borodino. The 
slaughter on both sides was terrific, but, though the Russians left the 
French masters of the field, they were not routed but continued their 
retreat. On the 14th, a week after Borodino, Napoleon reached Moscow. 
He found the city deserted and empty ; the next day it was in flames. 
For five weeks the Emperor remained at Moscow — though half the town 
was a charred ruin — vainly hoping that the Tsar would come to terms. 
Then he began his retreat by a different route, for on the line of his 
advance his army must have perished of sheer starvation. The Russians 
gave him one fierce battle, in which the victory lay with the French, but 
by this time the Grand Army was already shattered. It was not worth 
while for the Russians to accept another general engagement ; they were 
content to cut off supplies and perpetually harass the retreat of the 
starving army. Then the severities of a Russian winter came to their 
aid. At the crossing of the Beresina the French escaped annihilation and 
no more. Napoleon deserted his force, leaving Murat to conduct the 
retreat ; it was a mere remnant of the Grand Army that re-entered Prussia 
in December. The effect of the disaster was tremendous. Within three 
months the King of Prussia, swept away by the uprising of the national spirit, 
formally allied himself with Russia, declared war against France, and 
issued an appeal to all Germany to join in a war of liberation. Austria 
for the time held aloof. But meanwhile the amazing energy of Napoleon 
had produced a new army with which he twice defeated the allies before 
the end of May. Then an armistice proved fatal, for it enabled the allies 
to improve their organisation and to bring Austria into the coalition. Even 
then Napoleon won a great battle at Dresden in August, but in the middle 
of October the gathered nations overwhelmed him at Leipzig. Napoleon 
was no longer fighting to dominate Europe. The question now was 
whether Europe would crush Napoleon. And Europe was only just 
beginning to believe that in fighting against Napoleon it was not fighting 
against Fate. 

But Britain's particular concern was with the Peninsula. The Moscow 
disaster compelled Napoleon to withdraw more troops from Spain, and 
Wellington prepared for a decisive campaign. In May he crossed the 
Portuguese frontier, and on June 21st he met Marshal Jourdan and King 
Joseph at Vittoria. The French army was shattered, and fled in rout 
to the Pyrenees, leaving behind the whole of its artillery and stores, a 
million of money, and the accumulated spoils of many years. Except 
in the extreme north, the Peninsula was practically clear of the enemy 
by the end of June. The British army in Spain was now to become the 
invader of France. Nevertheless, it was only after a long series of stubborn 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 763 

engagements with Soult that Wellington made good a footing on French 
soil. The last fierce battle, itself an indecisive one, was fought at Toulouse 
on April 10, 18 14. And that battle itself was a sheer waste of life; 
for the allies had taken heart of grace, poured into France, and taken 
possession of Paris ; and on April 6th Napoleon had abdicated. Louis 
XVIII. was proclaimed King of France, and Europe permitted Napoleon 
to retire to the principality of the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. 



IV 

INDIA AND AMERICA 

In 1 81 2 Britain had become involved on her own account in a separate 
war with the United States, and throughout the whole period of the contest 
with Napoleon she had been establishing and extending her dominion in 
India. To these two fields we shall now turn our attention before proceed- 
ing with the events in Europe during the fifteen months which elapsed 
between Napoleon's abdication and his final overthrow. 

At the close of the century Lord Mornington, who had just been created 
Marquess Wellesley, was Governor-General of India, had completed the 
overthrow of Tippu Sultan, and had annexed the greater portion of his 
territories to the British dominion. Wellesley was the first British 
Governor-General who deliberately and of set purpose sought to add to 
the realms under direct British administration. Clive, after the conquest 
of Bengal, which had not been designed, desired no further expansion ; 
Warren Hastings had had enough to do in organising and maintaining what 
was already secured, and the acquisitions of territory under Cornwallis had 
been forced upon the Governor-General. His successor, Shore, had pur- 
sued a policy of non-intervention to a point which had aroused in native 
potentates new hopes of overthrowing the British dominion. Wellesley 
was the first to recognise that an actual paramount power was a necessity 
in India, where each native potentate desired supremacy for himself. It 
was clear to Wellesley that if the British were to remain in India at all it 
must be in the character of paramount power. The overthrow of Tippu 
was a palpable necessity which would have been as patent to Cornwallis as 
to Wellesley himself ; it could not properly be called an act of aggression. 
But to Wellesley it was not an inconvenient but a welcome necessity. 

His great instrument in establishing British ascendency was the system 
of subsidiary alliances, the system under which the country powers were 
guaranteed British protection against aggressors by virtually surrendering 
the control of their military force to the British. Their main standing 
army at least became under these conditions a British contingent ; an 
army, that is, of sepoys disciplined and commanded by British officers. 
The payment of the force could not be left to the potentates ; it must be 



764 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

maintained by the British, and therefore the potentate must guarantee the 
cost to the British. The one secure guarantee was the cession of territories, 
which provided a sufficient revenue for the purpose. Thus a double end 
was served. The potentate, while he was secured against aggression, could 
by no means defy the advice of the power which controlled his soldiery ; 
he had in effect become a dependant, and at the same time the British had 
become the effective possessors and administrators of new territories. On 
these lines subsidiary alliances were made, and districts were ceded by the 
Nizam and the Nawab of Oudh. The persistent misrule and the exten- 
sive debts of the Nawab of the Carnatic provided a sufficient ground for 
pensioning off the dynasty, annexing the province, and placing it under 
direct British administration. Dynastic questions at Tanjur and Surat 
were settled when the British took over the control of administration as a 
condition of recognising the technical succession of the respective claimants. 

Rivalries and hostilities between the heads of the different branches of 
the Maratha confederacy gave Wellesley another opportunity. Each of 
them had stoutly refused the British proffer of a subsidiary alliance until 
the Peishwa at Puna accepted a treaty as a lesser evil than subjection to 
Holkar. The result was that Sindhia and the Bhonsla tried to bring about 
a combined Maratha resistance, and so brought on the Maratha war, from 
which at first the jealous Holkar stood aloof. Sindhia, the most northerly 
of the Maratha chiefs, from his position at Gwalior generally held control 
of the Mogul. He had organised his forces upon the Europeon model 
under French officers. When war was declared in August 1803 this force 
was in the north, but Sindhia himself with a second army was on the 
borders of the Deccan to co-operate with the Bhonsla. It was in this 
southern war that the Governor-General's brother, Arthur Wellesley, won 
the laurels to which chiefly he owed his subsequent appointment to the 
command in the Peninsula. His small force completely routed Sindhia 
and the Bhonsla, first at Assaye and then at Argaon. Meanwhile, in the 
north Lake had defeated Sindhia's French general at Delhi, captured the 
person of the Mogul, and then crushed the Marathas at Laswari. By the 
end of the year both Sindhia and the Bhonsla had made peace, surrender- 
ing their claims to chauth from other princes, and ceding considerable 
districts, some of which were handed over to the Nizam. Incidentally 
Sindhia agreed to dismiss his French officers, and both agreed to accept 
British arbitration in disputes with native powers. The treaty completed 
the line of British territory along the whole seaboard from Calcutta to 
Madras, but it also in effect transferred the guardianship of the Mogul 
from Sindhia to the British, so simplifying their recognition as the sovereign 
power. 

It was unfortunate that Holkar now chose to rise on his own account, 
and that Colonel Monson, who was sent to deal with him, was obliged to 
beat a hasty and disorderly retreat, which brought much discredit on the 
British arms. Holkar ventured to attack Delhi, but was beaten off and 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 765 

driven out of the northern territory by General Fraser. It was at this time 
that Wellesley was recalled, owing to the alarm which his expansive policy 
had aroused among the directors. Cornwallis returned once more to the 
scene of his former labours, but only to die ; and the Governor-Generalship 
devolved upon Sir George Barlow. The appointment was not a happy one, 
for Holkar was granted peace upon terms which excited general derision 
and contempt for the British. 

Barlow, however, was superseded in 1807 by Lord Minto, who very 
soon realised that the policy of non-intervention was impracticable, and also 
that when the British did intervene they must do so in a decisive fashion. 
Minto's Governor-Generalship was marked by the establishment of friendly 
relations between the British Government and the astute statesman and 
warrior, Ranjit Singh, who was now consolidating into a very powerful 
kingdom the confederacy of the Sikhs in the Punjab. Not very happily 
also began the opening of diplomatic relations with Persia and with 
Afghanistan, in both cases owing to the first symptoms of the nervousness 
which Russia was to inspire throughout the century. It was just after the 
Tsar had made the Treaty of Tilsit with Napoleon, and the fear of Russian 
expansion towards the Indian border was never from that time forward 
absent from the mind of the British government in India. For the time, 
however, the alarm was allayed by the rapidity with which the sudden 
friendship between the Tsar and the Emperor cooled down and changed 
into hostility. Otherwise the most notable ventures of Minto's rule were 
the capture of Java from the Dutch and of Mauritius from the French. 
This latter was a stroke of importance, since the French station at Mauritius 
lay on the flank of the communications with the Cape ; and a squadron 
from the Mauritius was generally a possible danger whenever native powers 
were embroiled with the British. 

But Minto also was too aggressive for the authorities at home, and he in 
his turn was superseded by Lord Moira, who was shortly afterwards created 
Marquess of Hastings. The new Governor-General, like Minto and Wellesley, 
was no sooner in India than he found himself obliged to throw over the 
policy of non-intervention, although he had arrived fully determined to 
carry it out. By the beginning of 1814 he found himself forced into a 
war with a new enemy, the Ghurkas of Nepal — a very valiant race of 
mountaineers, who, in, spite of their small numbers, began to prey upon the 
people in the plains below the Himalayas. The first expedition sent against 
them was so disastrous that half of India was again on the alert for the 
breakdown of the British ascendency, but the stubborn hill-men were 
presently mastered in spite of a most courageous defence by the skill and 
persistence of Ochterlony. The treaty which ended the war in 181 5 as a 
matter of course transferred a great belt of territory from Nepal to the 
British ; but it also had the unusual effect of establishing a particularly 
loyal and enduring friendship between the Nepal government and the 
Ghurka race on the one side and the British on the other, a friendship 



766 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

of inestimable value in the darkest hours of the history of the British 
dominion in India. The rest of the rule of Lord Hastings belongs to our 
next chapter. 

The war with the United States arose out of Britain's use of her 
maritime supremacy and the injury to American trade caused by the 
Continental System, the British Orders in Council, and the virtual sup- 
pression of neutral traffic which the Americans attributed to the high- 
handed tyranny of the nation from which they had separated themselves. 
The utility of the Orders in Council was always somewhat doubtful, even 
from the purely British point of view ; they fell into abeyance after the 
death of their most determined advocate Perceval, and in 1812 they were 
withdrawn. But the mischief was done ; the United States had already 
declared war. As a matter of fact there had never been any reconciliation 
between the two nations, which still felt towards each other the bitterness 
engendered by a fratricidal struggle ; and in such cases a cool enquiry into 
grievances is not to be looked for. 

When the war began, just as Wellington and Marmont were facing 
each other and Napoleon was starting for Moscow, the British Government 
gave very insufficient attention to the minor contest with the United States, 
with the somewhat astonishing result that for some time the Americans 
were uniformly successful at sea. On the other hand, their reversion to 
the old attempt to capture Canada brought to them complete disaster, since 
the United Empire Loyalists fought against them with all the animus 
inspired by the events which had driven them across the St. Lawrence 
from their homes in the south. Canadians remember with a just pride 
the courage and skill with which their ancestors repelled the invader. In 
the course of time British naval supremacy re-asserted itself ; but the only 
memorably creditable performance of British sailors was the famous duel 
between the Shannon and the Chesapeake, when the Chesapeake was forced 
to surrender after fifteen minutes of fighting, although the two ships were 
equally matched. A British expedition under General Ross won a battle 
at Bladensburg and burnt Washington ; and another British expedition, 
mainly of veteran troops from the Peninsula, was smashed up at New 
Orleans in the attempt to storm impregnable entrenchments. Like the 
battle of Toulouse, this last engagement was a sheer waste, because a treaty 
of peace between the belligerents had been signed at Ghent a fortnight 
earlier, on Christmas Eve, 1814. 

The war was a particularly evil one, first, because it could have been 
easily averted by a little mutual common-sense and good temper ; secondly, 
because it served no good purpose for either side ; thirdly, because it failed 
to bring out on either side those virtues which are supposed to decay 
unless stimulated by hard fighting ; and, fourthly, because it left an 
inheritance of extraordinary bitterness between the two great nations of 
British race, a tradition of hostility and distrust which was scarcely allayed 
even when the nineteenth century was drawing to its close. In one single 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 767 

respect, however, the British Empire may be held to have benefited, 
because that war made impossible any such rapprochement between the 
Canadians and their southern neighbours as might have tended to sever 
Canada from the British Empire. 



V 

WATERLOO 

After the abdication of Napoleon the Powers proceeded to settle the 
affairs of Europe. The Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, though 
modified by constitutional limitations. The Tsar, and Castlereagh for the 
British, insisted upon generous treatment for France on the principle that it 
was not monarchical France but the Republic and Napoleon that had been 
responsible for the twenty years of war. Both also insisted on the limita- 
tion of the powers of the restored monarchy ; Castlereagh because of the 
pressure of British public opinion, the Tsar because he was at this time an 
ardent believer in theoretical doctrines of liberty. It was the honest wish 
of the British nation and of the British Government to set aside selfish con- 
siderations, and to strive for a general settlement whose permanence would 
be guaranteed by its fairness and justice. For herself Britain claimed little, 
and was willing to surrender much that she might legitimately have claimed ; 
it is noteworthy that her most persistent demand was for a humanitarian 
agreement for the suppression of the slave trade. But European affairs 
could not be settled merely upon broad principles of justice when pledges 
had to be taken into consideration which had nothing to do with broad 
principles but only with particular interests. After a preliminary settlement 
a Congress of the Powers was appointed to meet at Vienna in the winter, 
to arrange outstanding questions which were far too complicated and in- 
volved too many antagonistic interests to be settled in haste. 

We need not here follow the intricacies of diplomacy at the Vienna 
Congress during the winter of 18 14-15. Suspicions and jealousies made it 
no easy matter to re-arrange the distribution of European territories in a 
manner satisfactory to the great Powers, to say nothing of the minor states ; 
and at one time, in January 1815, matters had gone so far that France, 
Austria, and Britain made a secret treaty for united action in case the 
obstinacy of Russia and Prussia should rekindle a European conflagration. 
Still compromises were being achieved, and a general agreement seemed to 
be approaching, when all bickerings and quarrels were silenced by the 
startling news that Napoleon had slipped away from Elba, landed at Cannes 
on March 1st, and was appealing once more to the French nation to rally 
to his standard. 

The Bourbon restoration was not popular in France, since the attitude 
of the royalists on their return from exile showed that they had learnt 



768 



THE ERA 



appeal and hailed him emperor. 
Bourbon restoration ; those who 



OF REVOLUTIONS 

nothing from the Revolution. Napoleon proclaimed that he was coming 
to restore not a despotism but a constitutional system ; not to embroil 
Europe but to preserve the principles of the Revolution. The French 
troops in the south which were marched out against him answered his 

Most of the marshals had accepted the 
were true to the monarchy had to take 
flight precipitately. 
Napoleon's progress 
towards Paris be- 
came a triumphal 
march ; Ney, who 
advanced against 
him with loud and 
probably sincere 
protestations of 
loyalty to the Bour- 
bons, fell under the 
spell and joined his 
old master. On 
March 13th the 
Powers at Vienna 
proclaimed Napo- 
leon the public 
enemy of Europe ; 
on the 19th King 
Louis fled from Paris 
to Ghent ; on the 
20th Napoleon him- 
self was in Paris. 
On the 25th the four 
great Powers bound 
themselves to place 
a hundred and fifty 
thousand men apiece in the field. They were unanimous in the conviction 
that to make terms with Napoleon would be futile ; that his promises were 
insincere, and that in any case Napoleon, once more at the head of the 
French Empire, could not, even if he would, resist the temptation to resume 
aggression. 

During the following weeks the Powers were engaged in a somewhat 
feverish endeavour to bring their disbanded armies into the field. Austria 
and Russia, remote and slow-moving, could not hope to hurry their forces 
to the front ; Napoleon had the enormous advantage enjoyed by a dictator 
who holds all the strings in his own hands. At the beginning of June 
Wellington, created a duke in 18 14, was in command of the allied forces 
in the Netherlands, numbering ninety thousand men ; a heterogeneous 




The Duke of Wellington 
[After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.j 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 769 

force, of which some thirty thousand were British — mostly raw recruits, 
since the Peninsula veterans were not yet back from America. Some 
twenty thousand Bruns wickers and Hanoverians and the troops of the 
king's German legion, which had distinguished itself in the Peninsula, 
were also thoroughly to be relied upon ; the rest, chiefly Belgians and 
Dutch, did not inspire confidence. 

The Prussian forces under Blucher, numbering a hundred and twenty 
thousand, were extended a little to the eastward between Liege and 
Charleroi. Meanwhile, behind the French border Napoleon's energy was 
concentrating a force of a 
hundred andtwenty-fivethou- 
sand men, a large proportion 
of them veterans, at Valen- 
ciennes. Incidentally a diver- 
sion in Napoleon's favour by 
Joachim Murat, King of 
Naples, collapsed completely; 
Murat had to fly to France, 
and the Bourbon Ferdinand 
was once more proclaimed 
king of the Two Sicilies. 

Napoleon's strength lay 
in the extraordinary rapidity 
with which his organisation 
worked. The longer the time 
allowed to the allies, the 
greater would be the forces 
massed against him ; and his 
great aim was to be able to 
strike at them in detail and 

destroy them separately instead of allowing them to be massed together at 
all. The first object, therefore, was to strike between Blucher and 
Wellington before they could concentrate for united action. Napoleon 
delivered his first blow before his enemies' preparations were completed. 
On June 12th he left Paris to join the army. On June 15th he was over 
the frontier and swept the Prussian advanced corps out of Charleroi, 
driving it back on trie main body. This was the famous night of the 
Duchess of Richmond's ball at Brussels. The concentration had not 
yet begun ; it appears still to have been Wellington's conviction that 
Napoleon's intention was to turn his left and cut him off from the sea. 
Blucher hurried up his forces to Ligny ; Wellington promised him support 
if he were not himself attacked. Napoleon, however, despatched Ney to 
seize the cross-roads at Quatre Bras, while he himself flung his main attack 
upon Blucher at Ligny. Ney would thus be able to hold a British advance 
in check and to turn BKicher's left flank. 

3C 



^Qbrussels 


^ Louvain 


'^'"ififil'J/H S*- Lambert *j\ \ 

// \ aplanchenc >il' W \ 






WveUesjC h* na PP e 


«i 1 ^ 


II ^%&uatre Bras 


c: » x 

(5 • 




ij • Gemb/oux 


II Prosne su ^5^ 




jff II Sombreffe** 




II L igny *J^ 
llS^Amand^ 


i»"<k^5b~- Hamuoy 




O A Sombre ^ 


CharleroijQ 5 * 8 ^ J _^-' 







The Waterloo Campaign. 



77 o THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

The plan miscarried, but only in part. Some of the allies under the 
Duke of Saxe-Weimar occupied Quatre Bras before Ney's arrival. Ney 
did not attack at once, British regiments were hurried to the front one after 
another, Ney's attacks were beaten off, and before the end of the day the 
British were in superior force. A corps under D'Erlon wavered all day 
between Ligny and Quatre Bras, and failed to render any help in either 
engagement. The result was that although the Prussians suffered very 
heavy losses and were driven from the field, they were not routed but made 
good an orderly retreat under cover of night ; and Blucher, instead of 




Waterloo : the opposing armies. 

falling back upon his own base at Namur as the French expected, wheeled 
north to Wavre in order if possible to effect a junction with Wellington. 

Now, if Ney and D'Erlon had carried out their task without a hitch, 
Blucher, at Ligny, would have been not only defeated but routed ; the 
Prussian army would have ceased to count. As it was, Napoleon was 
perfectly satisfied that Blucher had fallen back in accordance with all 
orthodox rules of war upon Namur. He anticipated no difficulty in pre- 
venting his reappearance on the field, and to this end he despatched a 
containing force under Grouchy on the 17th, while he prepared with his 
main army to annihilate Wellington. 

The Duke, who was informed of Blucher's movements, drew in the 



THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 771 

forces from Quatre Bras and established himself on the ridge of Mont St, 
Jean covering the way to Brussels. Bliicher had promised to give his sup- 
port — if he could ; and it was Wellington's business — if he could — to hold 
on to the position he had chosen until Bliicher arrived. The event of the 
battle depended upon the Prussian's ability to carry out his provisional 
promise ; that is, Wellington was bound to fight with a view to winning a 
decisive victory if Bliicher arrived, although there was an exceedingly strong 
presumption that if Bliicher did not arrive at all he would find the task of 
holding his ground extremely difficult, especially in view of the character 
of his troops. As a matter of fact, both Wellington and Bliicher succeeded 
in carrying out the roles appropriated to them respectively. If Bliicher 
had failed, Wellington would probably have been forced to retreat. If 
Wellington had failed, a worse disaster than Ligny would probably have 
awaited Bliicher. Neither of them failed, and the result was that the 
French army was shattered to pieces. It was Wellington's battle because, 
unbeaten, he bore the„ burden and heat of the day. It was the Prussians' 
battle, because they weakened the attack upon Wellington, and, having first 
ensured the defeat, turned it into an overwhelming rout. 

Two facts combined to bring about Napoleon's overthrow by making 
possible the concerted action of British and Prussians. The cause of both 
was in part at least Napoleon's misleading information as to the line of 
Bliicher's retreat. The first regiments falling back from Ligny had made 
for Namur. Grouchy followed on a wrong trail, and therefore on the 
1 8th he failed to contain the Prussian army. Napoleon was satisfied that 
the Prussians could not arrive, and therefore waited till the 18th before 
attacking Wellington. It is conceivable that if Napoleon had opened his 
attack even three or four hours sooner than he did the Prussians would 
not have arrived in time to prevent him from carrying Wellington's 
position. But it is by no means clear that he would in any case have 
carried it. He relied upon tactics which had proved successful 
against every army in Europe except a British army ; but the peculiar 
British method had been employed with success against one after another 
of his best marshals. Broadly speaking, Napoleon's method was to hurl 
heavy masses of troops in column against the weak point in the extended 
line of the enemy, and so to break it and roll it up. But Soult knew by 
experience that the thin extended British line would stand up against heavy 
masses hurled against it without flinching. The column against the line 
had broken the troops of every other nation, but it could not be employed 
with confidence against the troops of Britain. Napoleon, it must be 
observed, had never yet met the British in battle himself ; and had not 
learnt by personal experience the lessons which had been brought home to 
some of his marshals. 

In the early morning, then, of Sunday June 18 Wellington knew that 
Bliicher would move with the object of attacking Napoleon's right flank; 
Bliicher knew that Wellington was going to give battle at Waterloo. 



772 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

Napoleon believed that there could be no dangerous movement on the 
part of the Prussians. Of Wellington's sixty-seven thousand men scarcely 
one-tliird were British troops, another third could be thoroughly depended 
upon, but the balance could not. Napoleon had seventy-four thousand men, 
and was very much better provided with artillery and cavalry. The left of 
the allied army was difficult to attack. On the centre and right the slope 
was not sufficiently steep to be a serious obstacle. The centre, however, 
was covered by the farm of La Haye Sainte, the right by the Chateau of 
Hougoumont. A dip behind the crest of the ridge to a great extent con- 
cealed the disposition of Wellington's troops. The leading feature of 
Napoleon's plan was to clear the way by a storm of artillery fire for hurling 
cavalry charges on the centre and piercing it ; but the capture of La 




The Chateau of Hougoumont after the battle, 
[From a drawing by S. Wharton made in 1815.] 



Haye Sainte, occupied by a portion of the king's German legion, was of 
material importance to the execution of this design. 

The two arms, then, upon which Napoleon chiefly relied were the artillery 
and the cavalry. He delayed opening the attack until noon in order that the 
surface of the ground might recover, as its soaked condition interfered with 
cavalry operations. The firing began, to cover an attack upon Hougou- 
mont, with the object not so much of capturing the chateau itself as of 
securing a position in the surrounding wood which would prevent the 
movement of troops on Wellington's right. Jerome Bonaparte, however, 
wasted much blood and energy in a fruitless attempt to storm the chateau, 
which was held with invincible resolution by a detachment of Guards. This 
was the prelude to the main attack on the centre, which was opened about 
1.30, just when it had been ascertained that a Prussian corps was ap- 
proaching from Wavre. D'Erlon's corps was launched against La Haye 
Sainte, where the Germans held on with the same stubborn valour which 






THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON 773 

was displayed at Hougoumont. But the French columns rolled up the 
slope, and the Dutch regiments which held the ridge at that point broke 
and fled. As the French topped the ridge, it seemed for a moment that the 
day was won ; but their columns were shattered and swept back down the 
slope by a furious charge of Ponsonby's Union Brigade — Royal Dragoons, 
Inniskillings, and Scots Greys. The brigade crashed up the slope on the 
other side of the valley, disabled a number of the French guns, and was 
then almost cut to pieces itself by a fresh force of French Lancers and 
Dragoons. But the attack had been repulsed, and the Germans still held 
La Haye Sainte. 

The time, however, had now come for Napoleon to launch the cavalry 




Waterloo : the crisis. 

charges upon the British centre ; but charge after charge was rolled back. 
The gunners on the front of the ridge worked their guns to the last moment 
possible, and then raced for shelter to the hollow squares into which the 
infantry were formed behind the ridge. Against the squares the cavalry 
broke in vain. The British and German horse charged upon the broken 
columns, and swept them back and down the hill again. The squares were 
repeatedly enveloped by cavalry, but were never pierced ; and the French 
charges were not supported by infantry, in part at least because these were 
now being drawn off on Napoleon's right to hold back the approaching 
Prussians. It was not till seven o'clock that Napoleon struck his last blow, 
sending the masses of his Old Guard in the wake of the cavalry charges. 



774 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

But the invincible veterans had met their match. The British centre was 
strengthened by regiments called in from the wings whose movements were 
concealed from the enemy. On their right the British line was wheeled 
forward so as to pour in a heavy flank fire upon the mass of the advancing 
columns. Nevertheless they surged over the ridge; then the word was 
given to the Guards who were lying under cover to stand up and fire. 
Even the Old Guard staggered before the withering volley, reeled and rolled 
down the slope again as the order was given for the whole British line to 
advance. The Prussians had swept the stubborn defenders out of Plan- 
chenoit on the French right, and were thundering in upon Napoleon's 
flank. The last desperate effort had failed, the defeat became a rout, and 
the rout a headlong same qui pent. The exhausted British halted, but far 
into the night the furious Prussian horse took their revenge for Jena. 
Three weeks later Napoleon surrendered himself to the captain of H.M.S. 
Bellerophon. 



CHAPTER XXXII 
FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 

I 

CASTLEREAGH 

The custodianship of the fallen Emperor was deputed by the European 
Powers to Britain. The dread he inspired could be allayed only by caging 
him in the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, whence 
escape was impossible. So closed the 
Titanic tragedy of Napoleon's career. 
The Emperor being disposed of, the 
Powers turned to the settlement of 
Europe. Britain, the one Power which 
from beginning to end had fought 
against French aggression, had never 
been forced to make terms, had never 
withdrawn from a coalition, and had 
finally borne the whole stress of the 
great fight by which Napoleon was 
ultimately overthrown, claimed no very 
great share of the spoils. Malta and 
the Ionian Islands in the Mediterranean, 
the Mauritius and Ceylon in the Indian 
Ocean, some islands in the West Indies, 
and the Dutch colony at the Cape, she 
was fully entitled to claim by right of 
conquest ; and these she took, although 
for Cape Colony she paid solid com- 
pensation in cash to William of Orange, on whom was bestowed the crown 
of a new kingdom of Holland, which included Belgium. She did not 
succeed in her efforts to persuade the Powers to unite in suppressing the 
slave trade, though a general declaration condemning it was issued. What 
she had won was sufficient to secure her supremacy in the Mediterranean 
and the complete command of the ocean route to India, which could always 
have been threatened on the flank by a Power possessing the Cape or 
Mauritius. It may safely be claimed that no other Power entitled to so 
much would have been content with so little ; but it was enough, for it 

775 




Lord Castlereagh. 
[After the portrait by Lawrence.] 



776 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

assured the maritime supremacy which made her further expansion certain. 
Moreover, apart from the treaty, the war itself had not only confirmed her 
commercial supremacy but had bestowed upon her an immense lead in the 
new industrialism of which she was the creator. Great as the strain had 
been, it had borne less heavily upon her than upon any other nation in 
Europe. In these islands alone the tramp of hostile legions had been 
unheard. Great as the waste of British lives had been, in every other 
country the waste had been far greater. Great as had been her expenditure 
of treasure, her commerce alone had expanded, while that of other countries 
had been almost destroyed. These were results of the war worth more 
than any other claims she might have endeavoured to enforce. 

In the general settlement of Europe she took prominent part mainly as 
a restraining influence. But for Wellington, France would have suffered 
more severely. The Duke, however, supported by Alexander of Russia, 
insisted that the country must not connect the Bourbon restoration with 
its own dismemberment, and it was given back its boundaries as they stood 
in 1 791. British influence was exerted also to check vindictive action 
on the part of Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies. Britain and Russia also 
favoured the concession of constitutions, in other words, limitations of 
absolutism, which were promised by several rulers, since there was some 
disposition to attribute the comparative success of the United Kingdom in 
the great struggle to the superiority of its political system, or rather to 
infer the superiority of its system from its success. But these promises 
remained unfulfilled. The Tsar's enthusiasm was diverted into a new 
channel by a new conception of his imperial duties ; the claims of authority 
superseded those of liberty, and though Britain declined to enter the Holy 
Alliance which was conceived and shaped by Alexander, she offered no 
effective opposition to its activities. 

The Holy Alliance was a very curious phenomenon, which compels us 
to some further consideration of the European programme at this period. 
There were two movements fundamentally associated, the first with French 
Revolution, and the second with the downfall of Napoleon — the democratic 
movement and the nationalist movement. Before the French Revolution 
the whole political and social system of very nearly every country in 
Europe rested upon privilege, upon the conception that certain members 
of the community were entitled by hereditary or by ecclesiastical right to 
rule over the rest and to rule in their own interest. In Great Britain, in 
Holland, and in Switzerland a very much larger proportion of the com- 
munity at large was permitted to exercise political rights than in other 
countries ; the pressure of privilege there, though sufficiently heavy, was 
very much less than elsewhere. The French Revolution was primarily 
on its political side the issue of the demand of the masses of the people for 
the abolition of political privileges and for their own admission to political 
rights. The early triumph of the French democracy had merged in 
Cassarism, but Caesarism had not restored the old system of aristocratic 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL j 77 

and ecclesiastical privilege. Within limits it confirmed instead of reversing 
the democratic movement. And it did so outside of France as well as 
within it. It had had this permanent effect — that it awakened the craving 
for political liberty throughout the classes hitherto excluded, and especially 
in those classes which had not been universally excluded. 

The Nationalist Movement, on the other hand, was not the cause but the 
outcome of the long war. For centuries past nationalism had played 
a strong part in the histories of Britain, France, Spain, and Holland ; 
and the same spirit had been awakened in Prussia comparatively recently 
by Frederick the Great. Even the French doctrine of natural boundaries 
had a nationalist basis, because the people within those boundaries were 
both by race and by language French rather than German or Italian. 
But outside these countries politicians paid no attention to nationalism ; 
their consideration was bestowed not on nationality but on territory. If 
one half of the Netherlands had achieved national freedom, the other 
half had fallen first under the dominion of the Spanish Hapsburgs, then 
under that of the Austrian Hapsburgs, then under that of France, and 
finally was transferred by the Congress of Vienna to the newly erected 
kingdom of Holland. German territories were tossed from one German 
prince to another. In Germany itself there was no solidarity, no sense of 
a community of German interests. In Italy principalities and dukedoms had 
been transferred from one to another of the great Powers in almost every 
treaty signed during the last three hundred years ; there, nationality was 
simply ignored. But it had been ignored more flagrantly than ever before 
by Napoleon, and his treatment of Spain, Germany, and Italy had kindled 
national sentiment to a flame. Hence the phase of the war which followed 
upon the Moscow expedition was a nationalist uprising, an uprising of 
the peoples against a foreign tyrant. Throughout Europe the events 
between 1789 and 181 5 had set in motion these two movements, the 
democratic and the nationalist, which, acting sometimes but not always 
in combination, were at the root of half the political complications of the 
nineteenth century. 

Now the Holy Alliance was the embodiment of the principle of resistance 
to both these movements. It was born in the brain of Alexander I., who 
had hitherto been an ardent advocate of liberal ideas. But behind the 
liberal ideas lay a rooted conviction of the divine authority which rests 
in kings. The king is responsible to God but not to his people for the 
righteous government of his realm. It is good for the people to participate 
in their own government ; therefore the king will do well to allow his 
people as large a share in the government as they are fit for ; but the 
share must be greater or less or non-existent as the king judges best, and 
the people have no right to call his judgment to account. They have no 
right to rise against the divinely constituted authority, or to question it ; 
they have to accept it. Let the kings therefore enter into a Holy Alliance, 
forming a brotherhood pledged individually to act righteously towards 



778 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

their own subjects and mutually to support each other's authority and 
to act in concert. As the divine authority of the king has nothing to do 
with nationalism, it followed that the Holy Alliance became practically 
an instrument for enforcing absolutism without regard either to popular 
rights or to nationalism. Territories were defined by international compact 
between kings who were pledged to support each other's authority in those 
territories. 

The princes of Europe all joined the league or expressed their sympathy, 
with the exception of the Sultan of Turkey, who, not being a Christian, was 
so to speak not eligible. Britain however stood aloof. Neither the king 
nor the prince regent in his place could join, because such an action would 
have been absurd on any basis except an absolutist theory which the 
British constitution expressly rejected. The British people soon saw with 
displeasure that if, as it boasted, it had by its example saved Europe from 
the Napoleonic despotism, its victory was going to be turned to account 
in order to keep Europe under the heel of minor despotisms. It in- 
creasingly resented the acquiescence of its Government in the policy of 
European monarchists ; and it attributed that acquiescence to the absolutist 
sympathies of the Foreign Minister Castlereagh. For, however strong 
the reaction had been in England itself, the whole history of the country 
compelled it to sympathise both with constitutionalism as against absolutism, 
and with nationalism. What Britons had won for themselves they were 
willing to see other peoples win. 

Nevertheless, in those classes at least which controlled the government 
the reaction still predominated. They would have resented a curtailment 
of their own powers, but they continued to be afraid of any extension of 
political liberty. The spectre of the French Revolution was not laid. 
Every reformer was assumed to be a covert Jacobin, and it was held that 
the safety of the state demanded the severe repression of all complaints. 
Such, too, was the attitude of the Government in an exaggerated degree. 
Criticism was an offence against order, and discontent a proof of the revo- 
lutionary spirit, and again Castlereagh was popularly fixed upon as the 
moving spirit in the repressive policy of the Government. 

The war had caused distress, the price of food had risen to a very high 
point, and wages had fallen because the supply of labour was greater than 
the demand ; the more so because the output of the new machinery was 
very much greater than that of the old hand labour, so that fewer hands 
were needed, and at the same time the population was increasing at a rapid 
rate. Expansion of the area of cultivation had, however, hitherto provided 
some compensation. But the peace increased distress instead of diminish- 
ing it. On the Continent industrial occupations revived, while the complete- 
ness of the British monopoly of maritime commerce disappeared. The 
market being overstocked with British goods, British production was 
checked. In the natural order of events the price of food-stuffs in Britain 
would have fallen, and the purchasing power of a stationary money wage 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 779 

would have increased, so that distress should have been reduced. Here, 
however, the Agricultural Interest in parliament intervened, and the Corn 
Law of 18 1 5 prohibited the importation of corn whenever the price in the 
home market was less than eighty shillings a quarter. Thus the high price 
of food was maintained, while the other conditions were tending to a 
diminution of wages ; and even the corn tax was insufficient to keep under 
cultivation much of the land which had been brought under the plough 
only when the country was compelled to depend wholly upon the supply 
of food raised within the four seas. 

Here, then, is a sufficient indication for immediate purposes of the 
economic causes of unrest and discontent. And these were aggravated by 
the wasteful finance of the Government, which continued after the peace 
the extravagant and ill-irregulated expenditure which the country had 
borne with during the time of the war. Parliamentary criticism, however, 
was concentrated upon the better regulation of the civil list, and the aboli- 
tion of the income tax -which had been introduced by Pitt expressly as a 
war tax. The Government proposed to appropriate the tax to the mainten- 
ance of an army of a hundred and fifty thousand men, which, from the 
point of view of the economists, was an unnecessary extravagance in time 
of peace ; besides which, expenditure on the army was made the more un- 
popular by the suspicion that it would be used in the interests of the Holy 
Alliance. The abolition of the income tax was carried against the Govern- 
ment mainly owing to the energetic agitation of Henry Brougham. 

In the country the agricultural and industrial depression brought about 
disorders and riots, while the Government held fast to its conviction that 
the remedy for these was to be found in severe repression, not in any 
attempt to investigate and deal with economic causes. Again the result 
was to intensify in the sufferers the belief first that relief could be obtained 
only by their own acquisition of political power, and, secondly, that the 
acquisition of political power would bring relief as a matter of course. 
Agitators clamoured against the monarchy and the constitution, and the 
Government failed to distinguish between agitators and sober reformers. 
The Spafields riot in December 18 16 led in the following year to sharp 
measures, for the suppression of " seditious meetings " and the suspension 
of the Habeas Corpus Act. Nor was the temper of the ministry improved 
by a serious rebuff, when a bookseller named Hone was acquitted on three 
several charges of publishing " blasphemous and seditious libels." 

A lull during 1818 was followed by renewed agitation during the next 
year, culminating in the affair called the Peterloo Massacre, when a large 
assembly in the neighbourhood of Manchester was dispersed by soldiery, 
certainly with insufficient reason. Half-a-dozen persons were killed, large 
numbers who had assembled without any sort of seditious intent were 
injured, and a feeling of bitter indignation was aroused. Unfortunately 
the Government identified itself with the action of the magistrates — which 
might reasonably have been condoned as an error of judgment in a difficult 



ySo THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

exigency — and it proceeded to pass a further series of repressive measures 
known as the Six Acts. Of the six, three were at least justifiable on the 
hypothesis that there was an appreciable danger of armed insurrection 
Two, directed to the suppression of seditious publications, were at best 
liable to interpretation as a tyrannical interference with the right of free 
criticism ; while the sixth, virtually suppressing all public meetings unless 
summoned by the principal local authorities, was a wholly inexcusable 
encroachment upon acknowledged liberties. The general soreness, it may 
be remarked, was increased by the persistent neglect of the Government to 




Cato Street, the scene of the conspiracy of 1820. 
[ From a contemporary drawing. ] 

accompany its repressive measures by any recognition of the necessity for 
remedial legislation. 

In 1820 died the old king, who for the last eight years of his life had 
been entirely incapacitated by brain disease, to which total blindness was 
added. The Prince Regent became King George IV., but no change was 
thereby effected. The event of interest which followed immediately upon 
his accession to the throne was the formation of a wild plot known as the 
Cato Street Conspiracy. The plotters, who were persons of no importance 
and no influence, designed to murder the whole ministry at a Cabinet 
dinner. Information was conveyed to the authorities, and the conspira- 
tors, who offered a fierce resistance, were seized in a room in Cato Street. 
Four of them were executed, five were transported, and the incident was 
used by the Government as a proof of the anarchical spirit abroad which 
had made their repressive measures a necessity. 

Public uneasiness was made the greater by the absence of any general 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 781 

sentiment of loyalty to the royal family, for which that family was itself 
responsible. The old king was held in respect, even in honour and in 
affection, by many of his subjects who could appreciate his sterling qualities 
and forgive, if they did not approve, his obstinacy and occasional wrong- 
headedness. His consort had been a pattern of domestic virtue. But none 
of the sons of George III. were distinguished by similar characteristics. 
For a long time the nation's hopes were fixed upon the Princess Charlotte, 
the daughter of the Prince of Wales, whose premature death in 18 17 was 
generally lamented as a national misfortune. But when she died the old 
king had no legitimate grandchild living, and of his seven sons and five 
daughters the youngest was forty. The Prince Regent was held in general 
contempt as a bad husband and a bad father. The Duke of York had been 
notoriously mixed up with grave scandals. William, Duke of Clarence, and 
Edward, Duke of Kent, were at least comparatively respected, but they as 
well as the youngest brother, Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, were unmarried. 
The fifth brother, Eraest, Duke of Cumberland, was the object of universal 
detestation, so much so that his accession to the throne might have 
sufficed to bring about a revolution, while the sixth brother had contracted 
a morganatic marriage ; so that the future of the monarchy was a subject 
of grave apprehension. The year after the Princess Charlotte's death the 
three unmarried brothers took wives, and the birth of the Duke of Kent's 
daughter, Princess Victoria, in 18 19, provided a new object for the hopes of 
the nation to centre upon, since it was felt that the child's life alone stood 
in the way of a serious crisis in the early future. 

Almost the first proceedings of the new reign brought the Crown into 
fresh contempt. George IV., when Prince of Wales, though already secretly 
married morganatically, had taken to wife the Princess Caroline of Bruns- 
wick. The two had long lived apart, and the princess had behaved at least 
with flagrant indiscretion for which George had given her as good excuse 
as any husband could. On her husband's accession to the throne she 
returned to England to demand formal recognition as queen, giving her 
due status in the Courts of Europe. The Government replied by intro- 
ducing in the House of Lords a bill to deprive her of her title and to 
dissolve the marriage. Popular feeling ran exceedingly high during the 
investigation of the charges on which the bill was based. The bill was 
carried on its second reading in the House of Lords by a majority of 
twenty-eight ; four days later the majority for the third reading was only 
nine. The Government, now certain to be defeated in the House of 
Commons, withdrew the bill. Not contented with this effective victory, 
she attempted in the next year, of course unsuccessfully, to enforce her 
own coronation along with that of the king, an undignified performance 
by which she lost most of the popularity which the bill had procured 
for her. Within three weeks of the coronation she was dead ; but the 
whole of the proceedings had given birth to unlimited scandal, and had 
displayed the king's character in a singularly odious and contemptible 



782 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

light which destroyed almost the last shreds of popular respect for the 
monarchy. 

Of more political importance than the elevation of the Prince Regent 
to the throne were the changes in the ministry which took place at the 
close of 182 1 and during 1822. Lord Sidmouth — formerly Addington, the 
head of the ministry which had been responsible for the Peace of Amiens 
— who had been the author of the Six Acts, retired from the Home Secretary- 
ship, in which he was succeeded by Robert Peel. The Marquess Wellesley 
again joined the Government as Viceroy of Ireland. Then in August 1822 
Castlereagh, who was just on the point of setting out to represent Britain at 
a European Congress assembled at Verona, committed suicide, and was 
succeeded at the Foreign Office by George Canning. Few ministers have 
been so intensely unpopular in the country as Castlereagh, and his death was 
hailed with unseemly acclamations of joy. Posterity has been more just 
to him than were his contemporaries. To him more than any other man, 
at least after 181 1 if not after 1808, was due the dogged persistence with 
which the French war was maintained ; he, more than any other man, 
through good and evil report stood by Wellington in the Peninsula War. 
Less of the responsibility for repressive measures at home belonged to him 
than was popularly believed ; and some at least of the discredit attaching 
to the foreign policy of the country must be attributed to the popularity 
achieved by his rival and successor at the Foreign Office, George Canning, 
and to misrepresentations of Castlereagh's own action. 



II 

CANNING AND HUSKISSON 

The return of Canning to the Foreign Office changed British foreign 
policy not in theory but in practice. Since 1820 the monarchs of the 
four greater European Powers had been alarmed by revolutionary move- 
ments in the Spanish, Italian, and Greek Peninsulas. In Spain and 
Portugal and in the Two Sicilies the movements were constitutional ; that 
is, they were directed to the establishment of constitutional instead of 
absolute monarchies. That in Greece was nationalist, and was directed to 
the liberation of a Christian community from subjection to a Mohammedan 
power. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian monarchs were all in favour 
of common intervention, in arms if necessary, in the former cases. Castle- 
reagh, on the other hand, discouraged this view of the duties of the monarchs 
of Europe, and clearly declined to make Britain a party to such joint 
action. Canning adopted Castlereagh's principles, and maintained that 
every country should be left to settle its own constitution for itself. But 
Castlereagh had restricted himself to abstention from interference ; Canning 
carried the principle further, and let it be understood that the interference 




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FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 783 

of other Powers on behalf of the absolutist monarchs might compel British 
intervention on the other side. He repudiated both the doctrine that the 
Powers were bound to act in concert and the doctrine that they had a 
right to interfere in the private concerns of their neighbours. His action 
had at least the effect of preventing other Powers from helping Spain in 
the reduction of her American colonies which were in revolt ; with the 
result that South America was separated from the Spanish dominion. 
Castlereagh had in effect permitted the voice of England to be neglected 
in European affairs. Canning reasserted her right to maintain actively as 
well as passively the principles of non-intervention. The firmness of 
Canning's attitude revived British prestige 
on the Continent, and served as an effective 
check on the self-appointed champions of 
absolutism. At the same time he refused 
to intervene except to prevent interven- 
tion. 

Modern party terminology makes it 
difficult to employ necessary words and 
phrases without conveying misapprehen- 
sions. Two great parties have appro- 
priated to themselves respectively the 
complimentary epithets Liberal and Con- 
servative, although there is no sort of 
opposition between Conservatism and 
Liberalism. Leaders of the Liberal party 
have been men of essentially conservative 
mind ; leaders of the Conservative party have been men of the broadest 
sympathies. It is not therefore in a party sense that we speak of the 
administration after Castlereagh's death as a distinctly Liberal one. In 
the party sense, an administration whose chiefs were solidly opposed 
to Parliamentary reform could by no means be described as Liberal. 
Peel, one of its most active members, was for some twenty years the 
recognised leader in the House of Commons of the party which began 
to appropriate the name of Conservatives. Canning had entered public 
life as the enemy of the French Revolution and all its works, and was 
an opponent of Parliamentary reform to the day of his death. But 
Canning was the disciple of Burke and of Pitt, both of whom, until the 
French Revolution, were conspicuously men of liberal mind, opponents of 
innovation but especially of reactionary innovation. Canning's sympathies 
were freely extended to constitutionalist and nationalist movements, as 
Burke's and Pitt's would have been. Peel does not present himself as the 
disciple either of Pitt or of Burke. But he was a man who, starting 
politically with an exceedingly narrow outlook, spent the whole of his life 
in gradually extending his vision and adopting new views as he slowly 
realised the force of arguments which ran counter to the postulates with 




George Canning. 
[After the portrait by Lawrence.] 



784 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

which he had started. Therefore every administration of which Peel was a 
member after 1822 was distinguished by liberal measures at least in some 
particulars. 

To Canning and Peel in the Liverpool administration was added 
William Huskisson, who joined it as President of the Board of Trade 
early in 1823. We have seen how the Liberalism of Canning displayed 
itself. That of Peel at the Home Office was shown chiefly in the revision 
and co-ordination of the Criminal Code. Great Britain in this respect 
lagged far behind most of the nations of Europe. There were some two 
hundred offences in the Statute Book to which the death penalty was 
attached, from petty larceny up to murder. The system defeated itself, 
as Thomas More had demonstrated three hundred years before. It 
offered a direct inducement to the petty offender to shield himself by com- 
mitting murder if murder gave him a chance of escape, since the penalty 
was the same. It offered an inducement to juries to acquit wherever there 
was a shadow of excuse for acquittal, because the sentence following upon 
an adverse verdict was an outrage on their humanity. Under Peel's 
auspices more than a hundred capital offences were struck off the list. 
Incidentally London also owed to him the institution of an efficient police 
force, popularly nicknamed in consequence " Peelers " or " Bobbies," who 
took the place of the wholly inefficient watchmen or " Charlies," to whose 
incompetent guardianship the protection of property and the maintenance of 
order had hitherto been entrusted. 

Pitt in his early days had been the pioneer of Free Trade. But 
further advance in that direction had been stopped by the war, and, when 
the war closed, the protection of the agricultural interest had been carried 
to an unprecedented length by the Corn Law of 181 5. In a Parliament 
consisting mainly of landed proprietors or their nominees, the protection 
of the agricultural interest was ensured, not because it was consciously 
selfish but because it conscientiously believed that the nation could prosper 
only if agriculture prospered and that agriculture could not prosper un- 
protected. The doctrines of Adam Smith, however, had made their way 
among the commercial community. In 1820 the merchants of London 
and of Edinburgh presented petitions urging that restrictions on commerce 
should be limited to taxation for purposes of revenue. It was maintained 
that free imports did not diminish production, except of goods which 
cannot compete with those of the foreigner in the open market ; that the 
energy devoted to the production of such goods under a protective system 
is merely diverted from the production of other goods for which the free- 
trading country has superior facilities; that in the stress of competition 
the free-trading country will discover improved methods of production 
which will still give it an equality if not a superiority in the rivalry. Pro- 
duction will be greater if left to flow along its natural channels than if it 
is artificially directed by protection into other channels ; checks on imports 
therefore are injurious to trade, and should be admitted only in order to 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 785 

provide the revenue required for the government of the country. Such 
was the view of the merchants, though obviously it was not the view of 
the protected trades, each of which profited individually from the pro- 
tection extended to itself, while it only shared with the general consumer 
the burden of higher prices imposed by the protection of other trades. 

A sudden and complete reversal of the existing system in accordance 
with the principles laid down by the mercantile community was obviously 
not practicable. Free Trade could only be introduced by degrees, giving 
the producers time to adapt themselves to the changing conditions. But 
the principles of Free Trade were made the basis of Huskisson's regime 
Like Walpole, Huskisson believed in attracting trade and making London 
the world's central mart. The most effective barrier to doing so was 
found in the Navigation Acts, which had already served their purpose of 
securing an immense British maritime preponderance, a preponderance 
so great that the protection and encouragement once looked upon as a 
national necessity had" become entirely superfluous. The Act now operated 
only so as to diminish the volume of trade by the partial exclusion of 
foreign shipping, without providing anything like an equivalent in the 
expansion of British shipping. Now, moreover, there was a serious danger 
that foreign countries would retaliate by excluding British shipping from 
their ports, a process which had proved futile enough in time of war when 
the British Navy could be brought into play, but would not necessarily 
be so futile in time of peace. Huskisson's Reciprocity of Duties Act 
authorised the conclusion of treaties removing the existing restrictions 
wherever reciprocity was guaranteed. Fifteen such treaties were made 
between 1824 and 1829. The ruin of the British marine was of course 
prophesied, but in fact the tonnage of mercantile shipping increased nearly 
fifty per cent, during the first twenty years after Huskisson's Act was 
passed, whereas in the preceding twenty years it had increased only ten 
per cent. The Navigation Laws, however, were not actually deleted from 
the Statute Book until 1849. 

Having dealt with the Navigation Acts, Huskisson proceeded with the 
reduction of duties. Between 1824 and 1826 several such reductions 
were made on minor articles. The duties on bar-iron and on cotton goods 
were lowered seventy per cent., but the most important changes were made 
with regard to silk and wool. In the case of wool there was hot opposition 
between the wool-growers and the manufacturers, for the former desired 
at the same time to have the existing duties on the export of wool abolished 
and those on its import retained, whereby they would have procured a 
monopoly of the home market and an extension of their markets abroad. 
The woollen manufacturers, on the other hand, wanted the export duty 
increased and the import duties removed, so that they might get their raw 
material as cheaply as possible. Huskisson compromised by retaining a 
low duty both on the exports and on the imports. The result was an 
enormous increase in the imports, but while there was no increase in the 

3D 



786 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

exports the British wool-grower still found an entirely adequate market 
among the British manufacturers. 

Very much the same thing happened with silk. Here there were no 
objections to the removal of duties on the raw material. The manu- 
facturers wanted to have heavy duties on French silken manufactures but 
not upon the spun silk which was their raw material ; whereas the silk 
spinners saw ruin staring them in the face if spun silk came in from abroad 
duty free. Huskisson faced the problem by reducing first the duty on raw 
silk by about ninety- five per cent., and then that upon spun silk by about 
fifty per cent. French silks had hitherto been prohibited, consequently 
they had found their way into England by smuggling. Now a duty was 
put upon them of thirty per cent, of their value. Thereupon, the de- 
mand for silks, which had been checked by the high price and by the vast 
increase of the cotton manufacture, was greatly augmented, the manu- 
facturers adopted improved and more economical methods, and English 
silks not only almost drove those of France out of the home market, 
but were very soon competing successfully with them in the markets 
of the Continent. 

The last year of Liverpool's administration, 1826, was marked by a 
demonstration of vigour in Canning's foreign policy. His action at an 
earlier stage had prevented foreign intervention in Portugal, where a 
constitutional government had been established. Spain was occupied with 
a civil war of its own, but the royalists there now attempted also to 
interfere in Portugal. An appeal from the Regent was answered by the 
mobilisation of a British force and a warning that it would be despatched 
to Portugal unless the Spanish interference ceased. The measure was 
effective, and Portugal was left alone. 

A new parliament had just met at the beginning of 1827 when a 
paralytic stroke compelled the retirement of Lord Liverpool. To his 
exceptional capacities it was due that a Cabinet which contained so many 
irreconcilables had held together for so long. Peel continued to associate 
himself with the old Tory element, which was exceedingly distrustful of 
both Canning and Huskisson, men who belonged to no aristocratic con- 
nection and represented ideas which were alarming to the old Toryism. 
Both were impressed with the evils resulting from the high price of corn 
maintained by the law of 18 15. Both were strong advocates of Catholic 
Emancipation, which was now becoming a burning question. A Catholic 
Relief Bill was passed by the House of Commons in 1826, but rejected by 
the Lords. The substitution of a "sliding scale" for the prohibitive Corn 
Law was carried and rejected in a like manner early in 1827. About the 
same time a resolution in favour of Catholic relief was defeated ; and now, 
with a Cabinet whose members held irreconcilable views on leading 
questions of the day, a new ministry had to be formed. Canning was 
invited to form it, and a number of the leading Tories who had supported 
Liverpool immediately withdrew. 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 787 

Canning was obliged to enter on a virtual alliance with the Whigs, 
with whom he was in fact by this time very much more in sympathy than 
with the Tories. But he was not destined to prove whether or no his 
brilliant talents fitted him for the supreme office. Within four months of 
his acceptance of the position of Chief Minister, George Canning was 
dead, leaving to posterity an elusive impression of brilliant but erratic 
genius, splendid audacity, fiery patriotism, and a puzzling combination of 
apparently contradictory political principles. For Canning, the advocate 
of political liberties abroad, was, like Castlereagh and Peel, the determined 
opponent of political reform at home. The consistent supporter of 
Catholic Emancipation would have nothing to say to the repeal of the 
Test Act. The enemy of the Holy Alliance defended the Six Acts and 
similar measures. In his own day he inspired affection, repulsion, admira- 
tion, enthusiasm, but never real confidence. He began public life with the 
reputation of a political adventurer ; he ended it at the moment when the 
helm of the state had at last been placed in his hands. But he never had 
the opportunity of showing how he would have used his power. 



Ill 

REFORM 

On Canning's death he was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lord 
Goderich who, as Frederick Robinson, had been one of his colleagues for 
the last four years. There was little change in the ministry, but its strength 
had lain in the personality of Canning. Goderich was inefficient, and resigned 
after six months, when the Duke of Wellington was persuaded to undertake 
the Premiership in spite of his own consciousness that the position was one 
for which he was thoroughly unfitted. No man was ever more absolutely 
sincere, more patriotic, more thoroughly disinterested. In certain emer- 
gencies, as when he had to deal with the Spaniards or when the victorious 
allies entered Paris, no man could have shown a cooler brain, a firmer hand, 
a stronger grasp of the situation. But party politics were entirely outside 
his range, and he was wholly out of touch with popular feeling ; in an 
independent position his words, his counsels, and his judgment always 
carried a very great weight, but as the leader of a party he invariably found 
himself conducting retreats from positions which, very much against his 
own will, he had learnt to recognise as practically untenable. 

Goderich resigned precisely five months after Canning's death. His 
tenure of office was signalised by only one remarkable event, the battle 
of Navarino. For some years past the Greeks had been engaged in the 
struggle for liberation from Turkish rule, for which Lord Byron gave his 
life. Russia had found it not inconsistent with the principles of the Holy 
Alliance to encourage the Greeks, with the expectation that by acting on 



788 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

their behalf she would make her own profit. Canning, also sympathising 
with Greece, had endeavoured to prevent separate action on the part of 
Russia, and to work by bringing to bear on the Porte the combined pressure 
of Britain, Russia, and France. Canning's efforts had culminated in his 
last public act, the signing of a treaty between the three Powers in July 
1827. The Porte remained obdurate, refused a suspension of hostilities 
against the Greeks, and summoned to its assistance the fleet of its great 
nominal vassal, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt. Ibrahim's fleet was lying in the 
bay of Navarino. In spite of warning from Admiral Codrington, who was 
in command of the allied French and British squadrons, Ibrahim continued 

to take part in the war on the mainland. 
The allied fleets in October entered the 
bay of Navarino. The Turco-Egyptian 
fleet fired upon them and was then an- 
nihilated in an action which lasted for four 
hours, although there had been no declara- 
tion of war. Public opinion endorsed the 
action of the Admirals ; but in January 
Wellington had become Prime Minister, 
and the King's speech at the opening of 
Parliament referred to the battle as an 
" untoward event," a phrase which excited 
great indignation among the Whigs and 
the disciples of Canning. 

In fact it very soon became evident 
that Wellington's attempt to reconstruct 
the Liverpool ministry of combined Tories 
and Canningites was doomed to failure ; in a very short time the 
Canningites, Huskisson and Palmerston, resigned, and Wellington's 
ministry became an exclusively Tory one, with Robert Peel leading 
the House of Commons. 

In effect the result of Wellington's accession to power was a reversion 
to the extreme policy of non-intervention, which left Russia very nearly a 
free hand in settling the Greek question, though the actual terms of settle- 
ment were finally arranged by Russia, France, and Britain in concert, and 
imposed upon both the Greeks and the Turks. The Greek frontier was 
defined, and Greece was erected into an independent monarchy, with Prince 
Otho of Bavaria as its king, in 1832. 

The Government was Tory, but it spent its time mainly in beating a 
series of reluctant retreats. Finding that the sense of the House of 
Commons had at last become strongly in favour of the repeal of the Test 
and Corporation Acts, it accepted a bill abolishing the Sacramental test and 
substituting a very mild form of declaration that officers would do nothing 
to the injury of the Church, although Wellington and Peel, like Canning, 
had hitherto resolutely opposed any change. Again, the Duke had wrecked 




George IV. 
[From a sketch made at Ascot Races, 18 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 789 

Huskisson's previous proposal to substitute a sliding scale for the Corn 
Law of 1815. Now he accepted a sliding scale ; that is to say, instead of 
prohibiting the importation of corn when the price was below eighty 
shillings, a duty of twenty-three shillings was imposed when the home 
price was below sixty-four shillings, diminishing as the price rose till it 
was reduced to one shilling when the price was seventy-three shillings 
or more. 

But the great surrender was on the question of Catholic Emancipation, 
upon which George III. had taken so obstinate a stand in 18 01, and in 
regard to which George IV. and his brothers had endorsed their father's 
attitude. The grievance in England was a minor one, chiefly because the 
Roman Catholics in that country, as in Scotland, were only a fraction of 
the population, and of these a considerable proportion enjoyed a wealth 
and a social position which enabled them to exercise a degree even of 
political influence. But in Ireland more than three-fourths of the popula- 
tion were Catholics r by whom the Protestant ascendency was felt as an 
intolerable burden and a monstrous injustice. The refusal of Catholic 
Emancipation at the time of the Union perpetuated the hostility between 
Irish Catholics and Protestants, and afforded a just ground for complaint 
that Irish consent to the Union had been obtained upon false pretences. 
In course of time the leadership in the Catholic agitation had devolved 
upon Daniel O'Connell, an orator of extraordinary power, an opponent of 
the doctrines of the French Revolution, who insisted upon the principles 
of constitutional agitation and habitually repudiated all appeals to violence 
and force, though his own fervid appeals to the emotions of an emotional 
race were not without an inflammatory influence. O'Connell had organised 
the great Catholic Association, which in theory at least restricted itself to 
legal forms of agitation and owned no connection with secret societies. 
Alarmed by its influence, Parliament had in 1825 pronounced it illegal and 
endeavoured to suppress it ; but it had only been reconstituted under 
forms which brought it again within the law, though its activities were 
restrained. Now the landlords had endeavoured to extend their own 
influence by nominally converting numbers of their tenants into " forty- 
shilling freeholders," who were entitled to exercise the franchise and on 
whose unfailing support they hastily counted. Their blunder was decisively 
demonstrated when, in 1828 the Catholic Daniel O'Connell was returned at 
the head of the poll in an election for County Clare, although his religion 
disqualified him from sitting in Parliament. The triumph was the greater 
because the election had been conducted in a perfectly orderly manner. It 
was easy to understand the meaning of the election, the intensity of the 
feeling to which it pointed, and the grave dangers which threatened if that 
feeling were persistently ignored. The Duke and Peel were converted to 
a belief not that Catholic Emancipation was in itself a desirable thing, but 
that a worse thing, armed rebellion, was the probable alternative. They 
chose the lesser of two evils, and in 1829 a bill removing nearly all the 



790 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

Catholic disabilities was brought in by the Government and carried ; and 
O'Connell took his seat at Westminster. 

In 1830 George IV. died. His influence on political life had not been 
prominent since the early days when the regency question nearly sus- 
pended Pitt's career. But his personal character had lowered the 
monarchy in public estimation to an unparalleled degree. The country 
had not become republican in sentiment, but if it had not been able to 
feel some respect for George's successor the permanence of the monarchy 

would at best have become exceed- 
ingly doubtful. Happily the heir to 
the throne was William, Duke of Clar- 
ence, since the Duke of York had 
preceded his brother to the grave ; 
and William was at least an honest 
man, not unpopular in his character of 
the Sailor Prince, who had abstained 
from flagrant offences against the 
sense of public decency. He was 
already sixty-five years of age, and 
during his brief reign the Crown re- 
covered something of its lost prestige, 
which was to be completely restored 
by the young girl who was his heir 
presumptive. It was generally under- 
stood that the new king was at least 
comparatively in sympathy with Liberal 
ideas. 

The cause of Catholic Emanci- 
pation had been won by Ireland, not 
by England, where it excited no enthusiasm. Not so was it with the 
great question which now confronted the ministry. Half a century before, 
the popular demand for Parliamentary reform had been gradually forcing 
its way to the front, though still held back by the antagonism of the 
governing classes and the private interests vested in rotten boroughs. 
Both Chatham and his son had advocated it ; but the French Revolution 
came and swept it out of the sphere of practical politics. There was no 
room for questions of reform when the guillotine was at work in Paris or 
while Britain was at grips with her great antagonist. But with the peace 
came a change. If ministers brought up in the atmosphere of reaction 
against Jacobinism remained persistently opposed to any extension of 
political power to the masses who were still shut out from it, or to a 
diminution of the control exercised by the dominant class, there were still 
Whigs who had gone out into the wilderness with Fox, and there was a 
new generation of Whigs who saw no advantages in a system which was 
calculated to keep them permanently out of office. Moreover, as the 




William IV. 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 791 

memories of the French Revolution faded, the pre-revolution doctrines of 
William Pitt began to resume their sway over intelligent minds, while the 
masses who were still shut outside the gates had learnt to believe that the 
remedy for their grievances lay in the acquisition of political power, for 
which their demands grew daily more insistent. Year after year since 
1820 Lord John Russell had brought forward in the House of Commons 
resolutions or proposals for disfranchising rotten boroughs and increasing 
the representation of the counties, and for the enfranchisement of the 
towns which were rapidly expanding in consequence of the new industrial 
system. Russell was regularly defeated, and, while Canning lived, the 
Canningites held by their leader in opposing reform, although that attitude 
was not easy to reconcile with some of their avowed principles. With his 
death their opposition weakened. Then in 1830, within a few weeks of the 
accession of William IV., the cause of constitutional reform received a new 
impulse from outside. In France a practically bloodless revolution was 
accomplished ; the absolutist king, Charles X., was forced to abdicate, and 
the "citizen king," Louis Philippe of Orleans, was raised to the throne. The 
manner in which the revolution was accomplished served in no small degree 
to allay the alarms of those who anticipated excesses of the old type as the 
inevitable concomitants of any departure from the existing system, any 
shifting of the centre of political gravity. Apart from what was called the 
" July Revolution," it had already become clear that the demand for reform 
could not long be ignored, and by that revolution much latent antagonism 
to it was removed. 

The battle began at once. Before the meeting of Parliament in 
November every one believed that some measure of reform was inevitable. 
The King's Speech, however, made no mention of the subject. Lord Grey, 
the leader of the Whigs in the House of Peers, who had been prominent 
among the advanced Whigs ever since the days of Pitt's first administration, 
referred to reform as a measure of prime necessity for diminishing 
public discontent. The Duke in reply declared in effect that the 
existing system could not by any possibility be improved upon, that 
the country had entire confidence in it, and that he himself should at all 
times feel it his duty to oppose any measure of reform. But even this 
declaration did not suffice to rally to the support of the Government the 
extreme Tories, Who considered that they had been betrayed over 
Catholic Emancipation. The Government was defeated on a side issue, 
whereupon the Duke and Peel both resigned, and Grey was invited to form 
a ministry. 

It is curious to observe that the statesman who ultimately carried 
the Reform Bill was himself of an intensely aristocratic temperament. 
Of the new administration four members only were in the House of 
Commons, and of those four one, Lord Palmerston, was an Irish peer, 
and another, Lord Althorp, the heir to an English earldom. The Lord 
Chancellor, however, Henry Brougham, was a peer only because he was 



792 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

made Lord Chancellor. It is to be remarked that the Marquess Wellesley 
was now in political opposition to his brother, and was associated with the 
new Government, although not in the Cabinet. A full half of the new 
ministry were Canningites. 

The change of government appears to have given to agitators the 
impression that the administration would be too weak or too sympathetic to 
punish disturbances, which broke out in several of the southern counties. 
They were, however, promptly disillusioned by its vigorous action, and by 
the prosecution and punishment of the ringleaders. It was unfortunate 
that the Whigs were seriously weakened by the want of any capable 
finance minister, since Huskisson was unhappily killed in the summer of 
1830 at the opening of the pioneer railway line between Manchester and 
Liverpool. 

In the course of centuries the system of representation had become 
very much changed. Originally the boroughs returning members had been 
the substantial towns whose members had been in the main returned by 
the burgesses. But whether they decayed or progressed these boroughs 
returned the same number of members as of yore. In many of them the 
election had been monopolised by the corporations ; in others, where the 
population had fallen off, the few electors had passed completely under the 
control of some magnate who could secure the return of his own nominee. 
Under the Tudors, and especially under the Stuarts, many additions had 
been made to the number of the boroughs, but these were "pocket 
boroughs " specially created by the Crown not because they were substantial 
towns but because they were under the Crown's control. Many of these 
also had since passed into the hands of magnates. New towns had grown 
up with large populations, especially since the development of machinery 
and the factory system had compelled the congregating of workers 
together; these towns remained unrepresented. The general effect was 
that in 1830 there were one hundred and fifty-seven members of Parliament 
who were the direct nominees of eighty-four persons, and another hundred 
and fifty whose election was practically controlled by seventy persons. 
In Scotland and Ireland the proportion of nominees was still greater. The 
enormous power exercised by landed magnates in returning members to 
the House of Commons obviously went a long way towards ensuring a 
tolerable harmony between the Representative Chamber and the House 
of Lords. That power a reformed system could not fail to destroy, and 
with it the effective supremacy of the oligarchical families in the govern- 
ment of the country. 

But it was not the intention of the Whig leader to introduce a demo- 
cracy, a government controlled by the masses of the people. A rational 
extension of the franchise to substantial citizens, a system which gave a 
real representation to the electors bearing some proportion to their 
numbers and their fitness for the exercise of political power, was the 
object aimed at by the author of the Reform Bill of 1831. The ten- 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 793 

pound householder in the boroughs, the ten-pound copyholder and the 
fifty-pound leaseholder in the counties, were to have the franchise. 
Corresponding changes were to be made in Scotland and Ireland. 
Boroughs with less than two thousand inhabitants were to be disfranchised 
altogether ; those with less than four thousand were to return only one 
member. Out of some hundred and seventy seats thus abolished some- 
thing over a hundred were to be re-allotted to counties, to great towns, 
or to Scotland or Ireland, the total number of seats being thus considerably 
diminished. 

The king before his accession had kept himself politically in the back- 
ground, but had been on the whole associated with the Whigs rather than 
the Tories. He was now definitely in favour of a moderate reform, and 
was well satisfied to find that Grey's bill made no concession to the 
extremists, as they were then considered, who demanded manhood suffrage, 
annual Parliaments, and the ballot. The bill was passed in the House of 
Commons on the first reading without a division ; but on the second reading 
the Government were able to secure a majority of only one in a very full 
house. A few days later an amendment to which they were opposed was 
carried, whereupon the king immediately dissolved Parliament, and at the 
general election, when the whole country rang with the cry of lt The bill, 
the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," Government was so strongly 
supported that its majority on the second reading was in the proportion 
of five to three. Though the Opposition fought stubbornly, the only 
material amendment was one which extended the franchise in the counties 
to .£50 tenants-at-will, such men having a very strong tendency to vote 
with their landlords. The majority on the third reading was not sub- 
stantially reduced. 

The king, however, was very much afraid of a collision between the 
two Houses, and though he approved the bill himself, urged Grey to modify 
it with a view to ensuring its acceptance by the peers. Grey stood firm, 
and the king's anxiety was justified. After a brilliant debate the Lords 
rejected the bill in October by a majority of forty-one. In the weeks 
following the rejection of the bill, public excitement was roused to a very 
high pitch. In many parts of the country and especially at Bristol there 
were serious riots. Grey was determined to bring the bill in again with 
little modification. . Negotiations with a view to compromise came to 
nothing. When the new session was opened in December there were 
changes, but not of principle. A slight variation in the basis of dis- 
franchisement, and the preservation of the existing number of seats without 
diminution, reduced the number of seats cancelled to about a hundred 
and forty and further increased the representation of the counties and of 
new boroughs. The bill was carried on the second reading in the 
Commons, this time by a majority of two to one, and on the third reading 
the majority was again larger than in the case of the previous bill. 

The king was intensely opposed to coercing the peers by a creation 



7 94 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

which would swamp their majority. Grey, with his aristocratic instincts, 
was extremely anxious to avoid such a step, but still held to it as a 
power to be used in the last resort ; and he was authorised to say that in the 
last resort the power might be exercised. The peers were induced to pass 
the second reading, though by a majority of only nine. The king was 
taking alarm at the temper which was being displayed in the country, and 
his own most conservative instincts were being disturbed. The Opposition 
felt emboldened, aud three weeks later carried an amendment which in 
effect shelved the bill. Grey thereupon advised the creation 'of a number 
of peers sufficient to ensure the passing of the bill, with the resignation of 
the ministry as the alternative. The king accepted their resignation, and 
called upon Wellington to form an administration for the purpose of 
carrying a modified Reform Bill. The Duke, who considered it his duty 
to suppress his personal views and to carry out the king's wishes, tried to 
do so, but Peel refused to join him. A week was long enough to prove 
that the attempt was hopeless, and the king recalled Grey. Wellington was 
informed that the necessities of the case would be met by the abstention of 
a sufficient number of peers to allow the passage of the bill. Accepting 
this course as preferable to the creation of fifty new peers, the Duke 
persuaded some hundred of the lords to withdraw, and the bill was carried, 
receiving the royal assent on June 7th. 

Limited as the franchise still was, so that the manual labourers, 
conventionally described as the " working classes," continued to be excluded 
from it, the great Reform Bill nevertheless destroyed the old oligarchy 
and transferred the political centre of gravity to the middle class. Corre- 
sponding changes were made in Scotland and Ireland, where the represen- 
tation of the former was increased by eight members and of the latter 
by five. 



IV 

INDIA AND THE COLONIES 

In India Lord Hastings, like his predecessors, continued after the war 
with Nepal to find it impossible to avoid native wars and the expansion of 
British dominion. The treatment of the Marathas after the removal of 
Lord Wellesley had in fact encouraged them to watch for opportunities of 
further aggression. Sheltered by the Maratha chiefs, large bodies of law- 
less soldiery known as Pindaris or Pathans established themselves within 
Maratha territory and carried their devastations all over Central India. 
British protests were met by promises which were left carefully unfulfilled, 
and it was impossible to doubt that it was the intention of the confederacy 
to foster and encourage the Pindaris as allies, by whose aid the British 
authority could be set at defiance. It became clear to Hastings that the 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 795 

preservation of order and security in India imperatively demanded the 
suppression of these robber bands which held the whole peaceful population 
in terror. In 18 16 George Canning had become President of the Board of 
Control, and, realising the nature of the emergency and the appalling 
character of the Pindari raids, he gave Hastings a free hand. 

Accordingly in 1817 Hastings opened hi. c campaign for the suppression 
of the Pindaris, the 
operations being on a 
scale very much larger 
than had ever . before 
been undertaken in 
India ; for as matters 
stood, it was practically 
certain that unless an 
overwhelming force 
were employed the "en- 
tire Maratha confeder- 
acy would take part with 
the robber hordes. 
Sindhia, fortunately for 
himself, was isolated and 
paralysed for action by 
the disposition of the 
British troops. Else- 
where, however, al- 
though the Pindari chiefs 
were quickly forced to a 
formal submission, both 
the Peishwa and the 
Bhonsla attacked the 
British, and the Pindari 
campaign was converted 
into a Maratha war. The 
general results were as 
concerned Sindhia that the British extended their protection to the Rajput 
states, over which 'he had usurped an ascendency which the Rajputs 
abominated. At Nagpur a new Bhonsla was set up, who was a minor, 
and the administration was temporarily taken over by the British. The 
Pathans and Pindaris were completely broken up and many of them were 
absorbed into the British sepoy army. The young Holkar accepted a 
subsidiary alliance of the normal type which was already in force with 
the Gaekwar. But the whole of the territories of the Peishwa, with the 
exception of the state of Satara, were annexed, and the Peishwa himself 
was removed to an estate on the Ganges basin with the enjoyment of an 
exceedingly substantial pension. Satara was reserved to the puppet 




India in the early nineteenth century. 



796 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

"royal" family of the Marathas, the descendants of Sivaji, the founder 
of the Maratha power. 

By way of contrast to the penalties of increased formal dependence 
imposed upon the Maratha states, a more dignified status was offered to 
the two great Mohammedan princes, the Nizam and the Wazir of Oudh, 
as the reward of their loyalty. Both were officially lieutenants of the 
Mogul, whose legal dignity Wellesley had made a point of upholding. 
Hastings now offered to both the title of king or " Padishah," implying an 
independent monarchy. Behind the offer lay the intention of diminishing 
the prestige of the titular sovereign of India, a step viewed with extreme 
suspicion by the Mussulman population, though not with any special dis- 
favour by the Hindus. The Nizam disdained the proffered honour as 
being inconsistent with his loyalty to the Mogul ; the Wazir of Oudh was 
less scrupulous, and became henceforth the king of Oudh. It must be 
remarked at the same time, with regard to the treatment of the Marathas, 
that the Peishwa had for the last century been the nominal head of the 
Maratha confederacy which, when united, had hitherto been the one great 
Hindu power in the Peninsula. There was now no Peishwa, no one with 
a traditional title to be regarded as the head of the Marathas. Thus the 
total result in 1819 was not merely the addition of extensive territory to 
the British dominion, but a marked step towards the formal assertion of 
actual British sovereignty. 

Three years later Lord Hastings resigned ; but for the suicide of Castle- 
reagh George Canning would have succeeded him as Governor-General. 
But Canning was needed at the Foreign Office, and the Indian appointment 
was given to Lord Amherst. Once more expansion was forced upon the 
Governor-General, but not in the peninsula itself. This time the challenge 
came from Burmah, which lay beyond the sphere of operations of the 
various empires which had dominated India. The Burmese were racially 
distinct from the peoples of India, being more nearly akin to the Chinese; 
moreover they were Buddhists, a religion which had taken its rise in 
Hindustan but had failed to retain its hold there, while it established its 
ascendency among the peoples beyond the mountains on the east and 
north. The Burmese empire was extensive, but it was in a great degree 
isolated from India by the barrier of the mountains and the sea ; and the 
Burmese emperor suffered from illusions as to his own power and that of 
the British. Before Lord Hastings left India the Burmese monarch de- 
manded from him the " restoration " of that part of Bengal which lay on 
the north-east of the Ganges Delta, which, of course, had never belonged 
to Burmah at all. Hastings had treated this communication as a forgery. 
But when Amherst arrived he found that the Burmese were taking aggres- 
sive action on the frontier. His warnings were treated with contempt as 
impertinences, and it at once became obvious that an appeal must be made 
to force. In May 1824 an expedition was despatched to Pegu, which 
occupied Rangoon ; but the character of the climate and the country 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 797 

delayed further operations till the winter. It was not till the autumn of 
the next year that the progress of the British forces impressed upon the 
Burmese the fact that they had aroused a dangerous enemy ; and it was 
only after some more severe defeats that the Burmese monarch was induced 
to accept the British terms. Assam, Arakan, and Tenasserim were annexed, 
and a British Resident was admitted to the Burmese capital at Ava. The 
nearest equivalent in the West of the term Resident as employed in Indian 
politics is Ambassador. 

Unfortunately, there had been much mismanagement in the conduct of 
the Burmese war, so that what ought to have been a short and sharp 
campaign was dragged out over a couple of years. A bad impression was 
produced in India itself, and the principality of Bhartpur lying on the west 
of the river Jumna tried the experiment of defying British intervention. 




Bombay Fort in the early nineteenth century. 
[From a drawing by William Westall, A.R. A.] 

The result was that the citadel of Bhartpur, which had been regarded as 
impregnable, was captured, and British invincibility was decisively re- 
asserted. The fall of Bhartpur impressed the native mind more strikingly 
than the operations of the Pindari war, and sixteen years passed before any 
other attempt was made to challenge British authority. In the Punjab, 
beyond the Sutlej, Ranjit Singh had consolidated an exceedingly powerful 
monarchy since the .beginning of the century ; but that very shrewd ruler 
consistently through all his life realised that the British were not to be 
challenged ; and in all his relations with them took very good care not to 
transgress those limits of his activities imposed by the danger of a direct 
collision with the Lords Paramount of India. 

After Bhartpur, then, the interests of our Indian history for several 
years centre entirely in administrative reforms associated mainly with 
the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck. 

Bentinck, who succeeded Amherst in 1828, may be taken as representing 
the more liberal spirit which was predominant in British politics after the 



798 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

retirement of Lord Liverpool, a spirit in which the principal danger for 
India lay in the disposition of the government to assume the appropriate- 
ness of Western ideas to Eastern conditions. The gains effected in actual 
administration, in the increased security of life and property, the improve- 
ment of material conditions, and the spread of education, were enormous, 
though in some respects sufficient account was not taken of native 
traditions and native prejudices, which were not fully understood. But 
the wisdom of the main lines followed, and the great preponderance of 
beneficial results, are beyond dispute. 

Four reforms in particular may be emphasised, the abolition of 
practices of an essentially barbarous character. The first of these was 
sati — the Hindu custom that when a man died his widow should sacrifice 
herself on his funeral pyre. In theory the action was voluntary, an act of 
self -dedication ; in practice it was habitually forced upon reluctant victims. 
Bentinck ventured on the suppression, in spite of very great fears that it 
would be followed by an outburst of fanaticism ; but the expectation 
happily proved to be without foundation. A very much more difficult 
affair was the suppression of thuggee. The thugs were a secret society 
with ramifications all over India devoted to robbery and murder, principally 
committed on the persons of lonely travellers who vanished and left no 
trace. The thugs were believed to work under the protection of a 
particularly powerful goddess, and so great were the material and super- 
stitious terrors which they inspired that there was extraordinary difficulty 
in procuring any sort of evidence against them ; nevertheless the work 
was accomplished, mainly by the persistent energy and skill of Colonel 
Sleeman. Even the existence of the organisation had been previously 
unsuspected by the authorities. Yet ten years after Sleeman commenced 
his operations, it had practically ceased to exist. 

The third was the organised system of brigandage known as dacoity, 
in which large numbers of apparently respectable persons were found to 
be concerned. Here, again, the process of identification and the collection 
of evidence presented extraordinary difficulties, and several years elapsed 
before fear of the law overpowered fear of the dacoits. The fourth evil 
practice successfully put down was that of infanticide, the habitual murder 
of girl babies, a practice which had arisen out of the crushing cost of 
marriages, while the marrying of daughters was looked upon as an 
imperative religious duty. Here the suppression was effected by removing 
the main motive for the custom rather than by punishing the offence, for 
the difficulty of proving that an infant had been murdered was enormous. 
The matter therefore was dealt with by legal restrictions on the expenditure 
at marriages and the exclusion from the attendant ceremonies of the hordes 
of beggars on whom it was considered a religious duty to bestow alms on such 
occasions. Other reforms belong also to the period of Bentinck's adminis- 
tration, which have to be associated with the more decisive ascendency 
of Whig doctrine that came into force after the carrying of the Reform Bill. 



FROM WATERLOO TO THE REFORM BILL 799 

The history of Colonial Expansion during this period is not marked by 
striking events. In the Canadas certain family groups became established 
as a dominant political aristocracy which monopolised administrative 
appointments and administrative control, somewhat as the Undertakers had 
done in Ireland before the Union. There was therefore growing discontent, 
especially in Lower Canada, where the population was mainly French and 
Catholic, while the group leagued in what was called the Family Compact 
was British and Protestant. Matters however did not come to a head 
until about the time when Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle on the 
British throne. Another point to be observed, however, is that the pressure 
of industrial troubles in the British Isles, with other causes, brought about 
an increasing emigration especially from Scotland, which added a demo- 
cratic element in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. 

In South Africa the British population began to accumulate beside the 
descendants of the Dutch and French Huguenot families which had been 
in possession for a eouple of centuries. The new settlers were planted 
largely between Capetown and the Kaffir districts on the east, and this 
increased the risk of collisions with the natives. For some time, however, 
there was as little interference with or alteration in the Dutch laws and 
institutions as in the case of the French in Canada. But before 1830 the 
government, which was still in the hands of a Governor and a nominated 
Council, began to introduce changes in accordance with British ideas, very 
much to the offence of the extremely conservative and suspicious Dutch 
population. The changes in themselves were undoubtedly improvements ; 
the objection to them lay in the fact that they were resented and misunder- 
stood by the people upon whom they were forced in a manner which did 
not attempt to be tactful. It was particularly ominous of trouble that the 
British authorities were moved by prevalent humanitarian sentiments, and 
were inclined to go as much too far in crediting the native races with a 
capacity for the immediate development of the virtues of civilisation as the 
Dutch, in accordance with their own tradition, went too far in treating 
them as belonging to a lower and distinctly vicious order of creation. 
Again these effects were to make themselves more prominently felt after 
the passage of the Reform Bill in London. 

Lastly, we have to record the slow progress of colonisation in Australia. 
The first colony of New South Wales with its nucleus at Sydney included 
Tasmania as well as the East Australian seaboard. Soldiers and convicts, 
when their term of service expired, were allowed to settle on the land under 
the control of a military governor. In 18 12 Tasmania was separated from 
New South Wales. The arrival of other settlers was slow, the convict 
settlements having a repelling effect. But after the peace M'Quarrie, the 
Governor of New South Wales, made energetic efforts to encourage immi- 
gration, and received assistance both in the shape of expenditure by the 
imperial government and from the agricultural and industrial depression 
which was driving emigrants still more rapidly both to Canada and 



8oo THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

to South Africa. By 1826 there were thirty thousand inhabitants in 
New South Wales, and the free settlers from home considerably out- 
numbered the convict group. Between 1813 and 18 31 a good deal of 
exploration was carried out, and vast areas were taken up for sheep farming. 
The new colony of Western Australia was started in 1829, and marked the 
beginning of a new movement towards expansion, having its sources in 
England. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE ERA 
I 

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

At the moment when the younger Pitt came into power in 1784, England 
and Scotland were beginning to feel the first effects of the impulses and 
the inventions which fn the course of fifty years revolutionised the industrial 
system and changed the bases of the whole social structure. The tools 
worked by hand were already largely displaced by machinery driven by 
water-power ; already the initial difficulties which James Watt had found 
in making his steam-engine workable had been mastered, and steam-power 
was being applied to mills. Already the development of a canal system 
had provided new facilities of transport and immensely increased traffic, 
and already the renewed process of enclosure was submerging the yeoman. 
Before the next fifty years were over, steam had become the driving power of 
the machinery which made Great Britain the world's workshop ; steam had 
been at last applied to locomotion, so that as concerns traffic the changes 
brought about by the canals were on the verge of becoming relatively insignifi- 
cant ; and a few years were to see the steamship on its way to supersede the 
sailing vessel. The yeoman had disappeared altogether, and the main 
population of England was no longer rural but had become urban. A new 
phenomenon in the world's history, an industrial nation, had come into 
being, pregnant with new problems. And society was barely beginning 
to think of adjusting itself to the new conditions, barely beginning to 
realise that the conditions were new and unprecedented. It was still unable 
to distinguish between the social revolution born in France, a revolt 
against feudalism, a 'revolution of ideas, and the economic revolution born 
in England, a revolution in material conditions. 

The application of water-power meant the setting up of machinery and 
the aggregation of workers where water-power was available. The applica- 
tion of steam-power meant the setting up of machinery and the aggregation 
of workers where coal was readily available. The demands of the new 
machinery for coal and iron gathered workers to the coal-fields and the 
iron-fields. These causes combined to shift the weight of population from 
the south to the north ; it made the northern counties the most populous 
instead of the least populous area of the kingdom, and turned places which 

801 ^ E 



802 



THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 



had been unimportant villages into crowded towns. But the population 
multiplied more rapidly that the employment increased ; and so long as 
the increased output of machinery outstripped the increased demand for 
goods which followed upon the lessened cost of production, the setting 
up of machinery diminished employment. Machinery appeared to the 
labourer to be a device to enable rich men to take the bread out of the 
mouths of the poor. They had no chance of realising that in the long run 
machinery would mean increased employment ; and even if they had been 
able to realise it, the prospect of good wages in the remote future did not 

compensate for low wages or none in the pre- 
sent. Therefore in the eyes of the working men 
machinery was an evil thing ; and with low 
wages and short employment came outbreaks 
of machine-smashing and general violence, which 
kept alive the conviction that only by stern re- 
pression could the country be saved from a 
repetition of the horrors which had taken place 
in France. 

The fear of Jacobinism, not the desire to 
control labour in the interests of capital, was the 
reason of the laws which in 1799 and 1800 
prohibited combinations and unions whether of 
masters or of workmen. The Government looked 
upon associations as in themselves dangerous, 
as instruments which would be unscrupulously 
directed to the subversion of the political and 
social order. But in fact under the new con- 
ditions the prohibition of unions placed the 
employed at the mercy of the employers. Con- 
certed action on the part of employers as well as concerted action on the 
part of the men was made illegal, but it did not practically affect them. 
Unless the men acted in concert, the individual master could always get 
as many individual men as he required on his own terms. In effect, there- 
fore, the law intervened on behalf of the masters against the men, while in 
theory it was applying one rule to both. The obvious conclusion for the 
labouring man was that the law was made in the interest of the employer 
by the governing class to which the employer belonged, and there would 
be no fair play for the working man until he got the making of the laws 
into his own hands. 

Until the end of the eighteenth century our own history presents us 
with few signs of class hostility either widely spread or bitter, after the 
period of the great Peasant Revolt. Even Jack Cade's rebellion in the 
middle of the fifteenth century was not a revolt of the lower against 
the upper classes in the social scale ; that character was attributed to it 
only by later writers ; and for that view there was no better ground 




-=*" -»-,£«= & 



The extended dress of 1789. 
[From a print.] 



THE ERA 803 

than that the leaders made use of such discontent as survived among the 
peasantry to increase their following. The revolts in the Tudor period 
were not risings of class against class, of poor against rich, but were 
the outcome of quite specific grievances. The Great Rebellion was in no 
sense a war of classes. There was no widespread sense of antagonism 
between labour and capital. But that was precisely the new sense which 
was brought into being by the new manufacture. Until the new manu- 
facture came into play the labourer himself possessed the tools of his trade. 
For the most part also his trade was not his sole means of livelihood. But 
with the new manufacture, accompanied by the new period of enclosure, 
his trade became his sole means of livelihood, and he was entirely 
dependent on the employer, who owned the whole machinery of pro- 
duction. The disappearance of the yeoman, and of the cottar who derived 
a part of his living from the plot of ground which he occupied, drew a 
sharper distinction between the capitalist class which paid wages for labour 
and the labouring class which gave labour for wages, between the wage 
payers and the wage earners. And precisely at the moment when the 
severance of classes was becoming more definite and marked came the 
French Revolution, the uprising of oppressed against oppressing classes, 
which, looked at from another point of view, was an anarchical revolt 
against all lawful authority. It was inevitable that the one point of view 
should be adopted by the dependent classes who had no share in the 
government and the other by the class on whom they were dependent, who 
monopolised the government. It was inevitable also that the two classes 
should conceive of their respective interests as mutually antagonistic. The 
employer, conscious of his own intention to be just, was indignant because 
the operative did not recognise his justice ; the operative could see no 
justice in a system under which his wages were low and precarious while 
the employer grew rich, as he argued, upon the proceeds of his toil. 
The new manufacturing conditions, therefore, created an antagonism 
between labour and capital for which the old conditions had provided no 
basis. 

In the agricultural districts, however, the effect was not quite the 
same ; the cottar-holding, the small farm, and the open field, were absorbed 
into large farms, and the large fields partitioned by hedgerows came into 
existence, which we* have learned to look upon as the characteristic of 
English landscape in all agricultural districts. The small farmer and the 
cottar were turned into wage-earning agricultural labourers ; but the wage- 
payer was the large farmer, not the landowner. The large farmer could 
conduct his operations with a very much more economical distribution of 
labour than was possible under the old system; but the antagonism between 
the rural wage-payers and wage-earners was very much modified by the 
new application of the Poor Law. With a large overplus of labour on 
the market, wages were low and employment was insufficient. The powers 
bestowed upon the magistrates by Gilbert's Act were brought into play ; 



804 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

the Speenhamland Board led the disastrous way by supplementing wages 
out of rates, and other boards all over the country followed suit. Wherever 
wages were below a certain level an allowance was made to the labourer, 
and that allowance was increased according to the size of his family. Thus 
a subsistence was secured to the labourer, while he was encouraged to 
increase his family and replenish the earth, since the enlargement of the 
population was regarded as an object of national importance, emphasised 
by the war. But the system, while it preserved the labourer from desti- 
tution, at the same time deprived him of all sense of responsibility. It 

destroyed the relation between work 
and wages, because whether wages were 
high or low, subsistence was secured ; 
and the farmer did not realise that he 
was making up by the payment of high 
rates what he saved by the payment of 
low wages. 

The war too came to help the agri- 
cultural community in another way. 
While the rapid increase of the popula- 
tion necessitated an increased food 
- supply, the war prevented that supply 
from being supplemented from abroad. 
The price of corn rose, and it became 
possible to bring under cultivation great 
areas of land which it had not before 
paid to put under the plough ; thus 
employment was increased. The prices 
which made the cultivation of inferior 
land pay made the better land pay 
enormously ; the landlords were able 
to obtain very high rents, while the farmer still pocketed large profits. 
The price of corn was fixed at that which made the poorer land pay, 
because if it had been lowered the poorer land would have gone out of 
cultivation, the supply would have run short, and the price would have 
gone up again. 

The war came to an end, and the agricultural interest, landlords, 
farmers, and labourers, were faced with the prospect of lowered prices. 
Land would go out of cultivation since the supply of food would be made 
good from abroad. Employment would diminish ; the capital expended 
on extension would be thrown away. The farmers' profits would fall, the 
landlords' rents would fall. Both landlords and farmers had acquired the 
habit of living up to the large incomes which the war had brought them, 
and retrenchment would be exceedingly difficult ; to many of them it 
would in effect mean ruin. And beyond their personal interests there 
were, it appeared, national interests at stake. The country would no 




"Royal Affability." 

[A caricature by Gillray of George III.'s interest in 
Agriculture.] 



THE ERA 805 

longer grow a supply of food sufficient for its own need ; it had only been 
able to do so during the war by bringing the poorer land under cultivation. 
If a new war came, that land could not be at once brought under 
cultivation again, and the country would be starved out. Without any 
consciousness of self-interested motives, the agricultural interest demanded 
that the price of corn must be maintained ; and it procured the enactment 
of the Corn Law of 1815, which kept up the high price of living for the 
population at large without securing to the agricultural interest the war 
rates of profit, while the steady multiplication of the mouths to be fed 
made it yearly more impossible that the country should continue even 
under the most favourable conditions to be 
self-sufficing in its food supply. 

Here, then, we may note an essential 
difference in the nature of the opposition 
between classes in the France of the French 
Revolution and the England of the Industrial 
Revolution. In France the primary op- 
position was between classes which stood 
legally on a different footing ; the privileged 
class consisted of the hereditary lords both 
of the soil and of its occupants, a group 
which was exempted from burdens while 
enjoying the exclusive possession of political 
rights. In England the technical distinc- 
tions between classes recognised by the 
law were very few. The political privilege 
of sitting by hereditary right in one of the 
chambers of the legislature carried with it 
no exemptions from public burdens. The lords of the soil were in no 
sense lords of its occupants, and could not command their services ; 
while, instead of being exempt from public burdens, they provided 
through the land tax a very large proportion of the revenue. The self- 
made burgess and merchant had the same political rights as the land- 
owner; they and the landowners who were commoners were not even 
barred from the prospect of acquiring the additional political rights of 
Peers of the Realm-; the law recognised no aristocratic caste. Politically 
it drew the line between persons possessed of a certain amount of property 
and the rest, but in theory there was nothing to prevent any number of 
the rest from crossing the line by becoming possessed of the necessary 
amount of property. The antagonism was between wealth and poverty, 
and it only became acute when translated into terms of Capital and Labour. 
As often as not, the capitalist himself or his father had risen from the 
ranks by a combination of intelligence, energy, and good fortune, in which 
he probably allowed much less credit to the last element than his 
neighbours were inclined to do. If the law intervened between him and 




" Farmer " George. 

[From Gillray's caricature.] 



806 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

his workmen it was only to insist that neither should coerce the other by 
combination. It did not strike the employer that whereas the individual 
workman could by no possibility coerce him, there was no difficulty what- 
ever in his coercing the individual workman. Nor did it strike him that 
while he could set the law in motion against the workman who broke 
it, the individual workman was quite incapable of reversing the process ; 
whereby the law, nominally even-handed, could be called in to his support 
if he wanted it but not to that of the workman. Yet it was this fact 
which convinced the workman that the law was on the side of the capitalist, 
and would only cease to be so when the workman himself had the making 
of it. In short, the antagonism in France was between the peasant and 
the bourgeois on the one side and the aristocrat on the other ; in England 
it was between the workman and the capitalist employer. 

The interests of the employer and the interests of the workman were 
opposed on the broad principle that it was to the advantage of the former 
to procure labour at the lowest possible wage. If there were employers 
who realised that they could get better value by paying higher wages, they 
were rare. Nearly all of those who paid more than the lowest available 
rates did so from motives of humanity, believing that they were acting to 
the detriment of their own material interests. While the supply of labour 
exceeded the demand, and employers remained convinced that cheap 
labour served their interest, labour could hope for improved conditions 
only through legislation or combination. But it was vain to look to 
legislation unless it obtained control of the legislature. It was useless to 
look to combination ; for even before the eighteenth century the judges 
were treating organisation as conspiracy under the common law, and in 
the last two years of the century the combination laws made concerted 
action on the part of men or masters a specific offence. The workmen 
were debarred even from combining to set the law in motion ; and being 
able to act only as individuals, for practical purposes they could not act 
at all, even when masters acted illegally. Magistrates had power to impose 
a scale of wages on the masters, but if the men combined to compel 
the masters to pay according to the scale they were sent to prison ; 
while obviously it would have been perfectly futile for individual workmen 
acting separately to claim at law the wage to which they were legally 
entitled. 

The law, however, did not operate effectively against all combinations, 
but chiefly against those of unskilled workmen, who were suspected of being 
as a matter of course revolutionaries. It was recognised that the skilled 
workman had a stake in society and a consequent preference for the pre- 
servation of law and order. Action was taken against combinations only 
at the instance of masters, and in the skilled trades masters were rather 
favourably inclined to combinations among the men. Hence it came 
about that in the reign of George IV. a successful movement for the repeal 
of the Combination Laws was carried through, which took its rise in the 



THE ERA 807 

skilled, not in the unskilled trades. It was the belief of the prime mover, 
Francis Place, that freedom of combination would at once procure an 
adjustment of outstanding questions reasonably satisfactory both to masters 
and men, which would make the continued existence of combinations 
superfluous. Place procured the passage of the bills of 1824 and 1825 by 
exceedingly clever management, and there is not much doubt that he would 
have failed if Parliament had realised what it was doing. But the actual 
effect was to secure the legality of collective bargaining and of collective 
withdrawal from work — in other words, striking — though there still re- 
mained to the judges a large latitude for discovering conspiracy under the 
common law. The repeal of the Combination Acts, however, only for a 
moment diverted the workmen from their conviction that the remedy for 
their grievances lay in the acquisition of political power. The immediate 




The first steamboat, the Comet, on the Clyde. 

[ From a print of 1812. ] 

effect was the birth of a large number of trade unions ; but the moment 
was unfortunate. A period of trade depression set in, unemployment in- 
creased, and the new unions were unable to prevent the lowering of wages. 
Therefore the impression rapidly prevailed that combination was unable 
to procure the anticipated benefits. So when the Reform Bill came, the 
working classes were angry and disappointed, because they still remained 
shut out from political power ; while the governing classes rejoiced that 
reform had been carried far enough to secure stability, but had stopped 
short of admitting the dangerous elements of the population to the 
franchise. 

Long before the accession of King George IV. steam had taken com- 
plete possession of manufacture. Water-power had had its brief day as 
the predominant agent, and the old domestic industries had vanished com- 
pletely. But there was still one more change to be effected by steam 
through its application to locomotion. Steam traction by land first began 
to appear practicable when iron rails were used to make an easy road for 



8o8 



THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 



trucks. The first railroad was not intended for steam traction ; it was in 
fact a horse tramway between Wandsworth and Reigate. But the inven- 
tion of a locomotive steam-engine was engaging the attention of engineers. 
In 1 812 a boat propelled by steam was launched on the Clyde, and two 
years later George Stephenson had built his first locomotive engine. The 
first railway authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers was that 
between Darlington and Stockton, sanctioned in 1823. It was due to the 
persuasions of George Stephenson that the steam locomotive instead of 
horse haulage was permitted. The difficulties which faced these early 
attempts are illustrated by the fact that the first endeavours to get this line 

authorised were blocked by 
the Duke of Cleveland, be- 
cause a portion of the line 
was required to pass through 
his estate. Without compul- 
sory powers of purchase it 
was impossible to lay down 
a line of any length if any 
landowner chose toblock the 
way. Moreover, superior 
persons scoffed at the en- 
gineers, and pointed out that 
the sane British publicwould 
most certainly refuse to allow 
itself to be carried over the 
ground at the terrific speed 
of sixteen miles an hour. 
Nevertheless, the Stockton 
and Darlington railway soon had a successor in the line between Manchester 
and Liverpool, whose opening in 1830 was the decisive moment in the history 
of traffic during the nineteenth century. The complete success of that epoch- 
marking function was marred by the unfortunate accident which killed 
Huskisson. But it was no longer possible to doubt that steam traction 
would supersede all other forms of transport whether of passengers or of 
goods by land. In this, as in the creation of manufacturing machinery, 
Great Britain took the lead, which materially assisted in giving her an over- 
whelming advantage in commercial competition. 




Stephenson's locomotive, the "Rocket." 



II 



LITERATURE 



The era of political and social revolution was the era also of a 
revolution in literature, or at least in poetical literature. The spirit which 



THE ERA 809 

gave birth to the French Revolution was one of revolt against conven- 
tions which society had come to regard as conditions of orderly existence. 
The same spirit revolted against the conventions which had made poetry as 
artificial as society. Poetry in England had been intellectualised, cut off 
from its emotional basis, severed from passion and from nature, cribbed, 
cabined, and confined by canons which restricted the subjects with which 
it was permitted to deal and the language in which it was permitted to 
express itself. Polite culture, however, had allowed a certain interest in a 
barbaric and uncultivated past. It had suffered itself to pay a tribute of 
admiration to the ballad literature col- 
lected by Allan Ramsay in Scotland 
and Bishop Percy in England. It 
had even indulged in a somewhat un- 
critical enthusiasm over James Mac- 
pherson's Ossian, which claimed to be 
an ancient Celtic Epic, though sceptical 
readers such as Dr. Johnson entirely 
declined to endorse its genuineness. 

From these explorations into the 
past came one of the impulses which 
helped to bring a new poetical literature 
to birth. A second impulse came from 
the fact that outside the recognised 
literary world the lyric in its simplest 
form, song, had survived as a natural 
product among the Scottish people ever 
since the days of William Dunbar and 
the reign of James IV. ; and Scottish 
song suddenly culminated in the genius 
of Robert Burns at the moment when England's last literary dictator was 
removed by the death of Samuel Johnson. In Scotland Burns was the last 
and the greatest of a long line of singers ; to England he appeared as the 
originator of a new movement. All that was greatest in him completely 
traversed the recognised literary canons. In the language of his own 
countryside, not in the language of culture, he expressed the emotions, 
the passions of his own countryfolk, in verse of that magical rhythm which 
no art can acquire. 

Burns himself was not in conscious rebellion against literary conventions, 
because those conventions had never been imposed upon him. Neverthe- 
less the new spirit was incarnate in him, hating bondage of any sort for 
himself or others, often reckless and uncontrolled, but ardent, sincere, 
and full of a broad and deep human sympathy. Convention stifled him, 
and when, on occasion, he deliberately fettered the form of his writing, 
his individual characteristics disappeared and he became common-- 
place. 








Robert Burns. 
[From the painting by Nasmyth. J 



810 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

For the true note of the Revolution was Individuality, and its strength 
lay in the free development of individual characteristics. The revolutionists 
were of no school ; they pursued the most diverse methods and the most 
diverse aims. They acted upon irreconcilable theories ; they were at one 
only in their rejection of the methods and theories and aims of the school 
which had dominated the eighteenth century. They were for the most 
part men to whom at the outset the French Revolution seemed to open 
out vistas of unlimited promise, in whom it aroused the passion of humanity 
and the passion for liberty ; both passions are perfectly consistent with 
the instinct of conservatism, the love of order, an even exaggerated ad- 
miration of the past. Many of them became the more conservative 
when the events in France disappointed their first enthusiastic hopes. 
Typical conservatives as well as typical revolutionaries were numbered 
amongst them. But they all agreed in breaking away from the current 
literary ideals and in asserting their own individuality. Burns was the 
harbinger of the new day whose dawn was signalised by the publication 
in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, which in- 
cluded Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, as 
well as many other pieces which exemplified a new theory of the poetic 
art. 

Thus was founded the i( Lake School," which was not a school at all. It 
was called a school and looked upon as a school because its members were 
associated together as friends ; and it was called the Lake School because 
they settled for a time in proximity to each other in the Lake district, which 
Wordsworth made his permanent home. To realise that in doctrine and 
practice they were poles asunder, it is sufficient to compare the two master- 
pieces in the Lyrical Ballads. An imagination at once vivid and mystical 
and a haunting melody of expression were the primary characteristics of 
Coleridge. Wordsworth was above all else the prophet of Nature, as the 
expression 

" Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man," 

the poet of 

" That blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened." 

As unlike to both Wordsworth and Coleridge as to Pope and Johnson 
was the next star that appeared on the poetical firmament, Walter Scott. 
Scott was no prophet ; he had no gift of spiritual insight ; but with him 



THE ERA 811 

poetry resumed its function as the medium of the story-teller. Before long 
he was to desert poetry for prose and to raise the novel to a new place in 
literature. Scott, in his own eyes, was not at all a rebel against the existing 
order ; he was merely reviving the conventions of the past, appropriating 
the ballad idea to new conditions. But for all that he in fact preached by 
his example a return to naturalism, to spontaneity, instead of submission to 
the canons of orthodoxy. 

Upon Scott followed Byron, superficially the most rebellious and 
fundamentally the most conventional of the whole group ; the most con- 
ventional, because he did not distinguish 
between poetry and rhetoric, and the 
great bulk of his verse is rhymed 
rhetoric, according therein with the 
eighteenth-century convention. But he 
too was insistent upon individuality. 
Two other great poets belong to this 
galaxy whose main poetical work was 
accomplished between 1785 and 1825, 
though three of them survived that 
date and Wordsworth's life was pro- 
longed until 1850. These two, Shelley 
and Keats, again emphasise the wide 
diversity, the individualism which char- 
acterised the new era. Keats may be 
called the high priest of the religion 
of Beauty, but if any actual historical 
personage can be named as the arche- 
type, the supreme expression, of all that is meant by the term " Poet," 
Shelley was that man. 

Poetry was re-born in the revolutionary era, and the nineteenth century 
learnt to regard it as a matter of course that there should be great poets 
living in England, regardless of the fact that great poets are not a normal 
and constant product of any country in the world. But apart from the 
poetic revival, the most striking literary features of the period were the 
creation of the Review and the establishment of the Novel as the most 
influential form of creative literature. The Edinburgh and Quarterly and 
Blackwood provided new media for criticism, and for the literary treatment 
of politics. When Sir Walter Scott turned from writing stories in verse to 
writing novels in prose it might almost be said that the novel stepped into 
the place which had once been occupied in literature by the drama. 
The literary aspirant came up to London with a novel in his bag in- 
stead of a tragedy in his pocket. For a full half century Scott continued 
to be acknowledged as the supreme master ; others took their places beside 
him perhaps, but superiority was claimed for none. Later generations 




Sir Walter Scott. 
[After the painting by Raeburn. ] 



812 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS 

have disputed his claims, but the fact remains that Scott was the master 
who taught the rest of the world the novelist's craft. George Stephenson's 
"Rocket" would not have travelled from London to Edinburgh at a 
speed of seventy miles in an hour, but as George Stephenson was the father 
of the modern locomotive, Walter Scott was the father of the modern 
novel. 



BOOK VII 

THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

CHAPTER XXXIV 

THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 

I 

AFTER REFORM 

The more flagrant anomalies of the old Parliamentary system were 
destroyed by the great Reform Bill in response to a strong national 
demand. The effect was to put an end to the immense preponderance 
of political influence hitherto possessed by the landowners and to transfer 
the balance of power to the manufacturing and trading classes. The 
working man was still excluded from the franchise, and property, after 
its first extreme alarm, again began to breathe freely. The concession to 
the middle classes had in fact set up a new barrier against a wider demo- 
cratic movement, and although the working classes were angry and dis- 
satisfied, the middle classes in the main held the government of the country 
in their own hands for six-and-thirty years, during which the old party 
titles of Whig and Tory were generally displaced by the new labels of 
Liberal and Conservative. 

During most of those years Liberals were in office, and the foreign 
policy of the Government was controlled by Lord Palmerston, an Irish peer 
who sat in the House of Commons as the representative of an English 
constituency. Palmerston stood for the Canning tradition and the Canning 
interpretation of non-intervention in the affairs of the European States ; 
an interpretation which claimed for Britain the right of intervening to 
prevent intervention by others, and by no means permitted the voice of 
Britain to be ignored in the councils of Europe, though she was only once 
involved in a European war as a consequence. Palmerston also established 
the second tradition of Victorian foreign policy — of regarding Russian 
aggression as the great danger to be guarded against, with its corollary of 
preserving the integrity of the Turkish dominion. 

One problem eternally vexed the souls of British statesmen, the 

problem of persistent discontent and disorder in Ireland, which broke up 

813 



8 14 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

more than one ministry and seemed no nearer settlement at the end of 
the period than at its beginning. A second problem, however, was to be so 
thoroughly settled that for half a century it practically disappeared from 
the field of political discussion. This was the question of Free Trade, 
which may be called the principle of hisses faire as applied to commerce. 
But in those questions which presented themselves as social there was no 
essential dividing line between parties ; although the stronger hold which 
the laissez faire doctrine had taken upon Liberals than upon Conservatives, 
upon the manufacturing than upon the landed interests, made the latter 
rather than the former advocates of state intervention. 

The general election which followed the Reform Bill brought back to 
Westminster a Parliament with a considerable Liberal majority. Lord 
Grey remained at the head of the ministry until the midsummer of 1834, 
when he and some of his colleagues resigned in connection with the Irish 
question, and a reconstructed Liberal ministry was led for some months 
by Lord Melbourne. That ministry was terminated by the last exercise 
of the king's right to dismiss ministers on his own responsibility. Peel took 
office, but a general election still gave the Opposition a Parliamentary 
majority ; Peel resigned in April. Melbourne returned to office, and 
remained at the head of the Government, except for a brief interregnum 
during 1839, until 1841. In that year he was displaced by a Conservative 
administration under Sir Robert Peel, who at the end of 1845 broke up 
his party by proposing the repeal of the Corn Law, which was carried in 
the following year. Peel resigned, his Government having been defeated 
on an Irish question, and the Liberals, by whose aid the Corn Bill had been 
carried, returned to power under the leadership of Lord John Russell. 
Practically, therefore, during the twenty years which followed the Reform 
Bill Liberals were in office except during the five years of Peel's adminis- 
tration, and the most prominent feature of that administration was the 
gradual adoption by the Premier of a policy to which the bulk of his 
own party was opposed while its principles were in favour with the 
Liberals. 

In the fifth year of the reformed Parliament there occurred an event 
of primary importance in the development of the British constitutional 
system. William IV. died, and was succeeded on the throne by a girl of 
eighteen. William had played his own part, it may be said, successfully, 
without attempting to exercise questionable constitutional influence, however 
strong his personal feelings might be. He was indubitably within his con- 
stitutional rights in his effort to avoid a creation of peers and in his 
dismissal of Melbourne's ministry ; but it was a very grave question whether 
his successor would follow his example. Failing the young princess, the 
next heir to the throne was the Duke of Cumberland, notoriously a re- 
actionary of a dangerous type, whose accession might have led to a 
repetition of 1688. But the young princess who succeeded to the throne 
had been trained to a very high sense of duty ; she became at once the 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 815 

political pupil of Lord Melbourne, who taught her the ideals of a 
constitutional monarch, and she was happy in marrying a German prince 
whose sense of duty was as high as her own, and who proved himself 
capable of learning to grasp constitutional conceptions remote enough 
from those known to any German court. A sentiment of chivalrous 
kindliness toward a young girl placed in a very difficult position revived 
the latent loyalty of her people, which was fostered and developed by her 
own admirable character and conduct. And this girl was destined to 
reign for sixty-four years, during which the principles of British con- 
stitutionalism became too firmly established to be easily shaken whether by 
revolutionists or by reactionaries. 

Another point, however, must be noted in connection with the accession 
of the queen to the throne. In Hanover, which, after 18 15, had been 
erected into a kingdom instead of an electorate, there was a male 
succession, and the crown of Hanover on William's death passed not to 
the new queen but to- the dead king's brother, the Duke of Cumberland. 
So ended the political link between Britain and Hanover, and British 
interests were no longer involved in essentially German problems as they 
had inevitably been during the period of the Union. 



II 

GREY AND MELBOURNE 

Apart from Ireland Lord Grey's ministry found itself faced with the 
need for a considerable amount of legislation. The charter of the East 
India Company required renewal and modification; in 1833 the company 
was allowed to retain its political position, but was at last deprived of the 
old trading monopoly which it had hitherto retained as concerned China. 
But the great questions of which Parliame.it undertook the handling were 
of the social and humanitarian type. Grey's Government carried the Act 
for the Abolition of Slavery and what is commonly called the First Factory 
Act ; and it introduced the Poor Law Amendment Act, which was carried 
by Melbourne's ministry after Grey's own retirement. 

Of the first two 'measures it may be said that the public conscience 
recognised their necessity, though it made no very clamorous demand for 
them. As to the third, Poor Law Reform, every one knew that it was 
needed, but it was one of those subjects which no Government could take 
up without the certainty of diminishing its own popularity. The Reformed 
Parliament did not always take the course which appeared best after the 
event, but it was eminently conscientious and faced its problems with a 
sincere desire to achieve what was best for the public good. 

The question of slavery was one which had long agitated the minds of 
Englishmen. In the last century it had been laid down by Lord Mansfield 



816 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

that no one on the soil of these islands was a slave. By long and deter- 
mined battling Wilberforce and his associates had at last driven home to 
the public conscience the iniquities of the slave trade and procured its pro- 
hibition. Great Britain had honourably distinguished itself by the zeal 
with which in 1815 it had urged the rest of the European Powers to follow 
its example. But the abolition of the slave trade did not carry with it the 
abolition of slavery ; in the West Indies and in South Africa black slaves 
were extensively employed in the plantations and farms. Nearly all the 
hard labour was slave labour, and the slaves were valuable property. It 
was impossible to abolish slavery, an institution sanctioned by the state for 
two hundred years, without compensating the slave-owners. Nor could so 
vast a disorganisation of the existing system of labour be carried through 
at a blow without disastrous results. There were absolutely no interests 
served besides those of the slaves themselves by abolition, except on the 
theory that free labour for wages would in the long run turn out more 
economical than forced, a doctrine which did not readily appeal to those 
who owned the slaves and would have to pay the wages. Nevertheless, 
British public opinion completely endorsed the Act, which set a term to the 
time during which service was to remain compulsory, declared that there 
was thenceforth no property in the persons of slaves, and provided out 
of British pockets twenty millions sterling to compensate the owners, the 
largest sum that has ever been raised for a purely humanitarian object 
without any possibility of a financial return. Huge as the sum was, it by 
no means satisfied the slave-owners, especially among the Dutch in South 
Africa, who set an immensely higher value upon their slaves as property 
than the sum allotted to them by the British Government. 

The demand for a Factory Act was also purely humanitarian in origin, 
and was viewed with extreme disfavour by many manufacturers and many 
also of the workmen. The development of factories during the last fifty 
years, accompanied by the Poor Law System, had brought about an 
immense amount of employment of children almost from the moment when 
they could walk and talk. In the depressed condition of labour the 
working-class parents saw only that the children brought grist to the family 
mill ; they did not see that the cheap child labour diminished the employ- 
ment and the wages of adults, besides utterly ruining the health, mental 
and moral as well as physical, of the children. And if the parents of 
working-class children were callous, so also were the administrators of the 
Poor Law who were responsible for the workhouse waifs. As a rule the 
main desire of the parish was to get the children off its hands, and to be 
free of the expense of maintaining them at the earliest possible moment. 

Almost fifty years before, the Manchester magistrates and the Manchester 
doctors were already awake to the evils for which the factory system was 
even at that early stage beginning to be responsible. But their powers en- 
abled them to do nothing more than to interfere with apprenticeship in the 
old standing trades scheduled in the old Statute of Apprentices, which in 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 817 

effect hardly touched the factories. At the same time the Manchester 
Committees gave full credit to the many cotton mills whose proprietors 
were careful to observe regulations of their own for preserving the health 
of the children in their employment. It may here be remarked that 
Robert Owen in his mills at New Lanark worked on the most enlightened 
principles, paying good wages and providing for the education of the 
workmen's children without putting them to any employment. 

As early as 1802 Sir Robert Peel the elder, the father of the famous 
statesman, had procured an Act which to a very slight extent improved 
the working conditions for apprentices in 
cotton and woollen factories. Some further 
infinitesimal restrictions were imposed in 
1 8 19 and 1825, but the manufacturers in 
general were already up in arms against 
breaches of the doctrine of laissez /aire, and 
interference with them in the management 
of their own business. Still there were 
other manufacturers who were philan- 
thropically anxious to procure better con- 
ditions for the children, but could not 
venture to go far on their own account, 
fearing that they would be too seriously 
handicapped in the competition with their 
less scrupulous neighbours. State regula- 
tion which imposed the same conditions 
on all would secure them against that 
handicap, and would insist upon no restrictions which they themselves 
would regard as objectionable. 

The more vigorous movement was started in 1832 by Michael Sadler, 
with the proposal that the labour of children should be restricted to ten 
hours per diem. His place as the champion of philanthropic legislation 
was taken in the Reformed Parliament by Lord Ashley, better known to 
posterity by his later title as Lord Shaftesbury. Grey's Government, how- 
ever, chose to make itself responsible for an Official measure — taking the 
place of Ashley's bill — which not only created regulations and imposed 
pains and penalties,* but appointed government inspectors to see that the 
law was carried out. The bill, which bears the name of Lord Althorp, 
forbade in textile factories the employment of children under nine, of 
children under thirteen for more than nine hours, and of young persons 
under eighteen for more than twelve hours. It is to be remarked that the 
employers as a whole did not oppose the Factory Act. There were among 
them the bad employers, who deliberately desired to exploit the labour of 
children for their own profit, regardless of the cost to the children. 
There were those who were possessed with a doctrinaire view that all state 
interference is a check on the natural course of trade, and therefore in 

3 F 




Lord Shaftesbury. 
[From the portrait by Millais.] 



818 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the end does more harm than good. But in England the passionate 
devotees of abstract doctrines are rare. The employers themselves origi- 
nated the proposal for state inspection, because they wanted to be secure 
that, if regulations were made, they would be enforced upon every one 
instead of being left to be carried out by the conscientious and ignored by 
the unscrupulous. There were, indeed, not a few of them who already 
went as far as the new law demanded, and to them it was entirely satis- 
factory that their neighbours should be compelled to follow suit. 

The third great measure dealt with the amendment of the Poor Law. 
The Elizabethan Poor Law in effect served its purpose in a fairly satis- 
factory manner for a century and three-quarters with very little modifica- 
tion ; but unemployment and the relief of destitution entered upon a new 
phase about the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Gilbert's Act was 
introduced to meet the new conditions, but in its practical application by 
magistrates it met them by virtually upsetting the principles on which the 
Poor Law was based. The old law gave relief only to those who were 
incapable of work, or who, being without employment, entered the work- 
house and did the work which was provided for them. But the benevolent 
magistrates under Gilbert's Act provided relief as well for every able-bodied 
labourer who was earning an insufficient wage, and thereby unintentionally 
encouraged the payment of insufficient wages by the agricultural employer, 
while they destroyed the labourer's incentive to earn higher wages by better 
work, and encouraged him to enlarge his family without any regard to his 
own capacity for supporting his children by his own efforts. 

The Poor Law Amendment Act, which was passed in 1834 after Lord 
Grey's resignation, abolished the relief which supplemented wages, and 
reinstated the workhouse test ; that is, it gave relief only to those who 
entered the workhouse. At the same time it organised the combination of 
parishes into Unions, which at once made their management more efficient 
and more economical. It compelled the able-bodied labourer to earn by 
his own work the maintenance of himself and his family instead of depend- 
ing upon extraneous relief, and as a consequence it forced the agricultural 
employer to pay the living wage which the labourer was forced to demand. 
But at the outset the only apparent benefit was the substantial one of greatly 
diminished rates. Wages did not immediately adjust themselves to the 
new conditions, and the labourer starved. The farmer, paying increased 
though still insufficient wages, did not feel the reduction in the rates as 
adequate compensation. To the needy the workhouse conditions were 
deliberately made as unattractive as possible, lest they should offer an 
inducement to " come on the parish " ; and since no one sought relief who 
could possibly help it, to do so carried with it a stigma which often acted 
as a preventive precisely in the cases where relief was most needed and 
most deserved. In the long run the new Poor Law materially improved 
the position and conditions of the agricultural labourer ; but in the begin- 
ning, during the process of readjustment, his lot was worsened. The 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 819 

authors of the Act cast their bread upon the waters, and their immediate 
reward was of the usual kind in such circumstances. 

The Poor Law Amendment Bill had already passed through several 
stages in Parliament when Lord Grey's ministry was broken up by differ- 
ences upon Irish questions. The reconstruction was entrusted to Lord 
Melbourne, with a vain hope on the king's part that he would combine with 
Peel and Wellington. This project however was impracticable, and the 
new administration was as definitely Whig or Liberal as the last. King 
William, on the other hand, was waiting anxiously for an opportunity to 
bring in the Conservatives. Lord Althorp, who commanded an extra- 
ordinary degree of confidence in the House of Commons among all sections 
of Liberals, was transferred to the House of Lords, when he became Earl 
Spencer in succession to his father in November. 

This event appeared so to weaken the party, or at least the Cabinet, 
that William felt justified in dismissing the ministry and calling upon 
Wellington and Peei to form a government. He undoubtedly thought 
that the country, like himself, wished to be rid of the Liberals, especially in 
view of the great outcry against the Poor Law Amendment Act and the 
present sufferings which that Act entailed. The dismissal of the Liberals 
made an appeal to the constituencies an obvious necessity, since in the 
Parliament which had begun its sessions in 1833 the Conservatives could 
not hope to command a majority. Peel announced his principles, of what 
was called Liberal Conservatism, in the "Tam worth Manifesto." At the 
general election the Conservatives were returned in considerably larger 
numbers than before ; the curious may observe with some interest that 
there were two hundred and seventy of them, forming a minority larger 
perhaps than any other single group, but unable to resist a combination of 
orthodox Liberals, advanced Radicals, and Irish Repealers — a position 
singularly like that of the Unionists in 19 10. They hoped, however, for 
support from a considerable number of the Conservative wing of the 
Liberals, so that for a while they attempted to carry on the government. 
But when the Liberals struck an unofficial compact with O'Connell, 
Peel's administration was doomed; and in April 1835 Melbourne returned 
to power with most of his old colleagues in the Cabinet. 

The principal measure for which the new Government was responsible 
before the death of- the old king was the Municipal Reform Act, a natural 
corollary of the Parliamentary Reform Bill. The old municipal govern- 
ment was in a state of chaos, and the new Act established a uniform system 
under which the governing body, the Council of the borough, was elected 
triennially by the rate-payers, and the mayor and aldermen were elected by 
the Council. 

Of the permanent influences brought to bear upon the British constitu- 
tion with the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 we have already spoken ; 
in the immediate problems of government it made no difference. The 
general election which followed very shortly kept the ministry with a 



820 



THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 



substantial if somewhat uncertain majority; and in the next four years 
Melbourne did good service to the country by the admirable manner in 
which he educated the young queen in the duties and responsibilities of 
her position. But a period of legislative stagnation followed upon the 
activity of the last four years. Distress and its usual accompaniment, 
discontent, were painfully prevalent, but no remedies were forthcoming 
from Parliament, which was satisfied that political reform had gone far 
enough. Two outside agitations however were now set on foot. The 

Anti-Corn-Law League fixed upon the high 
price of corn as the fundamental cause of 
the general distress, and in 1838 began its 
active propaganda for the abolition of the 
corn duties — a propaganda as little agreeable 
to Melbourne as to Peel and Wellington. 
But the originators of the League and its 
most vigorous advocates were of the manu- 
facturer class ; and while most of them were 
actuated by the sincere belief that the working 
classes would derive immense advantage from 
the reduction in the price of food, it was easy 
also to point out that the manufacturers an- 

/ticipated benefits for themselves, since they 
\ would be able to pay a lower money wage 

^^r^ggRSr- r i when less money would buy more food. 

Among the working men themselves there 
were not a few who viewed the agitation 
with suspicion, believing that its real object 
was the curtailment of wages. They mis- 
trusted gifts from the class whom they re- 
garded as their natural enemies ; moreover, 
they saw in the movement an insidious at- 
tempt to distract their energies from the per- 
sistent pursuit of political power which was their own panacea for the 
depression of the working classes. 

Therefore from them arose the second agitation whose objects were 
formulated in the series of six demands known as the People's Charter, the 
advocates of which became known in 1839 as Chartists. The demands 
which appeared so revolutionary in those days scarcely seem alarming now. 
Abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament, payment 
of members, and the ballot were three of the points, all of which have 
since been conceded. Manhood suffrage is not far removed from the 
official proposals of the Government in 191 2 ; and the objection to equal 
electoral districts rests more upon their impracticability than upon abstract 
conservatism. The sixth demand, for annual Parliaments, is the only one 
which finds no advocates among responsible politicians who are not looked 




Queen Victoria in 1 837. 
[From a painting by W. C. Ross.] 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 821 

upon as extremists. But seventy years ago every one of the six points 
was regarded as revolutionary — by enthusiastic advocates as a straight 
road to the millennium, and by respectable but timorous persons at large 
as a straight road to anarchy. So the Government would have nothing to 
say either to Chartists or to Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers. The refusal of 
Parliament in 1839 to receive a huge Chartist petition was followed by 
several violent outbreaks which were sharply repressed, and the vigour of 
the agitation died down for the moment. 

The Anti-Corn-Law League had little more success than the Chartist 
movement with the Government, whose financial difficulties nevertheless 
induced them in 1841 to make another movement in the direction of Free 
Trade. Disciples of Adam Smith could cite plenty of instances in the 
past of an increased revenue following upon a diminution of duties upon 
imported goods, due to the increased demand. The Government now 
proposed to lower the very heavy tax upon foreign imported sugar, and to 
establish a fixed duty-of eight shillings on foreign corn in place of the existing 
sliding scale. But the budget was defeated by a substantial majority, and 
the defeat was followed by a resolution of " no confidence," which was 
carried by one vote; Parliament was dissolved, and the general election 
gave a strong majority to the party led in the House of Commons by Sir 
Robert Peel. Melbourne resigned and Peel became Prime Minister. 

In 1839 there had arisen a curious domestic crisis which caused intense 
excitement at the time. The Government through these years was in a 
constant minority in the Lords, while its majority in the Commons was 
sufficiently insecure to warrant the Upper Chamber in an active opposition. 
After narrowly escaping defeat in the Commons on a colonial question, 
Lord Melbourne resigned and advised the queen to send for Sir Robert 
Peel. Peel undertook to construct a ministry ; but he pointed out to the 
young queen that the ladies of the bedchamber who had been selected by 
Lord Melbourne belonged to the Whig families, and surrounded their 
mistress with an atmosphere which would prevent her working cordially 
with a ministry formed from the Conservative party ; he therefore made 
the dismissal of certain of these ladies a condition of his taking office. 
The queen claimed that the appointment of the ladies was a personal not 
a political matter, and entirely declined to dismiss them. The question was 
one which could only arise when a queen occupied the throne. Both the 
monarch and the statesman stood firm, and consequently Lord Melbourne 
returned to office, considering that the queen's position was constitutionally 
sound, and that in the circumstances it would be an act of desertion to 
refuse her his services. It was very shortly after this event that the queen 
married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — one of those 
unions rare enough in royal families in which both parties were lovers from 
the beginning and remained lovers to the end of their lives. 

Probably the most popular feature of the Melbourne administration 
was its foreign policy as conducted by Lord Palmerston. That minister 



822 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

acted very much as if he were an autocrat in whose doings his colleagues 
had no voice. His audacity might cause nervousness, but at least there 
was no fear that Britain would be ignored in the councils of Europe. It 
was from this time that suspicion of Russia and antagonism to her became 
prominent features of British policy. Like Canning before him, Palmerston 
was bent on preventing Russia from either acquiring Turkish territory or 
exercising a predominant influence at Constantinople. More than this, he 
succeeded in pushing his own country to the front as the champion of the 
integrity of the Turkish Empire, drawing France and Austria in his train, 
but keeping the leading position for himself. The notable stroke was 
effected in 1840. Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, was evidently seeking 
to establish an independent sovereignty over Syria as well as Egypt, and 
his ambitions probably went considerably further. It was Palmerston's 
object to make the repression of Mehemet AH an act of the European 
Powers in general, not merely of Russia. He succeeded in bringing about 
a concert of the Powers sufficient for his own purposes, while in effect it 
enabled him to accomplish the defeat of the Pasha by means mainly of 
British ships and men without effective participation either by Russia or by 
France ; and Turkey began to learn to look upon Britain as her protector. 
The anti-Russian policy had also at this time begun to play a serious part 
in India ; but with this as also with important events in the colonies we shall 
deal separately. 



Ill 

PEEL 

The ministry formed by Sir Robert Peel in September 1841 was more 
Liberal in its elements than the Conservative party in Parliament ; for the 
Duke of Wellington, who joined the Cabinet without taking office, was fully 
alive to the necessity for making concessions which he regarded as being in 
themselves undesirable. Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham had both 
been in the past associated with Melbourne. A minor office was found for 
Gladstone, a young man for whom a brilliant future was anticipated ; but 
Benjamin Disraeli, in spite of the remarkable talents which he had already 
displayed, was too little trusted, consequently he nursed a grudge against 
Peel for refusing him the advancement to which he considered himself 
entitled. The bedchamber question, it should be remarked, was not revived. 
By the advice of Lord Melbourne the queen had already deprived her house- 
hold of its partisan aspect by admitting some Opposition ladies, and it was 
not possible to assert the claim that ladies should be changed with changing 
ministries. 

Peel had obtained a majority in the country not so much on the 
ground of positive objections to the Government policy as because ministers 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 823 

had recently given a general impression of feebleness and incompetence, of 
endeavouring to face their difficulties by mere makeshifts. When Parliament 
met at the beginning of 1842 the new ministers had plenty of problems to 
solve. Chartism was again becoming active, trade was depressed, want 
was widespread, Ireland was disturbed, rumours of disaster had come from 
India. The country at least hoped that the financial ability with which 
Peel was credited would find some solution for the existing problems, so 
far, at least, as they sprang from economic causes. He was hardly 
committed to anything more than the maintenance of the principle of the 
sliding scale, as against the fixed duty on corn proposed by the Liberals. 
His first budget was, therefore, awaited with no little anxiety. 

A very large amount of Peel's support inside and outside the House 
came from the landed interest, which was extremely averse from any 
tampering with the Corn Laws, which in their eyes gave too little rather 
than too much protection to the agricultural body on whose prosperity that 
of the nation depended. On the other hand, among the manufacturing 
class especially, the Anti-Corn-Law League had been developing the con- 
viction that the high price of corn was the root cause of the general 
distress. Peel dealt with the Corn Law by providing a new sliding scale, 
of which the primary object was to prevent violent fluctuations of price 
while ensuring a tolerably remunerative minimum. With corn at fifty 
shillings a quarter or less there was to be a twenty shilling duty on the 
foreign import. With corn at seventy-five shillings or more there was to 
be no duty. Between these two points there was to be a graduated 
reduction of duty as the price rose. A preference was also given, in the 
form of lower duties, to colonial as against foreign corn. Amendments on 
the one side in favour of abolishing the duty, and of making it more 
stringent on the other, were defeated by overwhelming majorities, and 
the official Liberal amendment in favour of a fixed duty fared not very 
much better. But there were some who believed that Peel already in the 
bottom of his heart was a convert to the views of the League, though 
he was still trying to persuade himself that his convictions were un- 
changed. 

The new sliding scale at any rate shelved the Corn Law question for a 
time. But the problem of providing public revenue was serious. Year 
after year the Liberal budgets had ended in deficits, which had not been 
removed by attempts to enlarge the revenue either by the increase or by 
the diminution of duties. Some fresh source of taxation must be found or 
some old source again called into play. In this fateful year Peel revived 
the Income Tax, which Pitt had introduced for the purpose of the great 
war, but which had been swept aside, as justified only by war, soon after the 
peace. Peel himself regarded it now only as an emergency tax which 
would cease to be necessary when trade revived. He anticipated its 
disappearance in five years" time. Many Chancellors of the Exchequer have 
indulged in similar anticipations and all have been doomed to a similar 



824 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

disappointment. Not till the twentieth century did it come to be recog- 
nised in form as well as in fact as a permanent source of revenue, though 
it has never been remitted since 1842. 

One purpose of the income tax was to tide over a period during 
which the revenue was to suffer immediate loss for the sake of future gain 
by the reduction of duties on imports. Out of twelve hundred articles on 
which a duty was at this time levied nearly two-thirds were to have the 
existing duty reduced ; it was expected that after three years the return to 
the revenue would become greater instead of smaller, but that in the 
meanwhile the loss would amount to not much less than the receipts from 
the income tax, which was fixed at yd. in the pound. The sugar duty was 
retained unaltered. The Opposition were able to point to the inconsistency 
of reducing a very large number of taxes for the benefit of the consumer 
with very little regard to the producer's interest, coupled with the retention 
of the heavy taxes on corn and sugar, which put money into the pockets of 
the landed interest, on whose political support the Government depended, 
and of the wealthy planters whose influence was of great value to them. 
There was also not a little grumbling on the part of the home producer of 
goods on which the duties were reduced. Peel, however, was strong enough 
to override the opposition both of opponents of the Corn Law and of the 
advocates of higher protective tariffs. 

The next budget of importance came three years later in 1845. Mean- 
while, apart from Ireland, which was a constant thorn in the side of every 
government, Chartism and legislation with regard to labour had again 
compelled attention. In 1842 the second great Chartist petition was pre- 
sented demanding the " six points " and protesting against what it described 
as " class legislation." It was evident enough that the petitioners expected 
by the acquisition of political power, through the six points of the Charter, 
to be able to subvert the existing order of society in the supposed 
interests of the working class ; and it was this expectation on their part 
which more than anything else inspired in the dominant classes a dread of 
any extension of popular power. As before, the House refused to give the 
petitioners a hearing. The result was that later in the same year there 
were serious Chartist riots which necessitated the intervention of the 
military ; but the Government measures were effective, and the Chartists 
themselves became more and more definitely divided into Physical Force 
men and Moral Force men who relied upon constitutional agitation in 
preference to the methods of violence. 

Althorp's Factory Act had been directed exclusively to the protection 
of children in textile factories. Now public sentiment was horrified by 
the report of a commission on the conditions of labour in the coalfields. 
An appalling state of things was revealed, in which large numbers of women 
were engaged in hard underground labour for which they were totally 
unfitted, and which could not but be ruinous not only to their own health, 
but to the physique of the next generation. No less intolerable was the 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 825 

very extensive employment of quite young children in similar occupations, 
which to the present generation would be simply inconceivable. So intense 
was the public feeling aroused that, when Lord Ashley introduced his 
Collieries Bill to exclude all females and all boys under thirteen from 
underground work, it was carried in the House of Commons without a 
division. 

The Act for the first time brought women as well as children within the 
scope of legislation. Arguments for the protection of children, it was seen, 
applied in principle to the protection of 
women. They were not free agents, 
and could make no terms for them- 
selves. The question of their treatment 
affected not only themselves but that 
of the physical and mental degeneration 
of the race. Accordingly, after two 
abortive attempts a new amending 
Factory Act was passed in 1844, which 
reduced the working hours of children 
to half-time in a day of fifteen hours in 
factories, and restricted to twelve the 
working hours of women as well as of 
young persons. 

The budget of 1845 showed a 
marked advance in the direction of 
Free Trade, of which there had been 
some warning in the previous year. 
Export duties were to be abolished, as 
well as duties on the import of four 
hundred and thirty articles of raw 
material. The very considerable gain to 
the manufacturing interest did not make 
the budget satisfactory to the high Protectionists, and Disraeli denounced 
the Government as an " organised hypocrisy " ; but the support which 
Peel lost from his own party he recovered from members of the Opposi- 
tion, and the budget was carried by large majorities. At the same 
time a breach between the minister and many of his Conservative 
followers was widened by his Irish policy ; and Ireland was now to be 
the decisive factor first in determining his complete conversion to the 
doctrines of the Anti-Corn-Law League and then in putting an end to 
his administration. 

A tremendous visitation of the potato blight entirely ruined the potato 
crop in Ireland, and brought not merely destitution but starvation in its 
train. In November Peel proposed to his Cabinet the suspension, which 
every one knew must mean the abolition, of the duties on imported corn, 
since the provision of cheap food had become an absolute necessity. At 




Sir Robert Peel moving the repeal of the Corn 

Laws, January 1846. 

[From a sketch made in the House of Commons. ] 



826 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

first only three of his colleagues supported his views ; by the end of the 
month Wellington and some other members of the Cabinet were prepared 
to side with Peel ; and in the meanwhile Lord John Russell, who was now 
the recognised leader of the Opposition, publicly announced his own con- 
version, and his advocacy of the total abolition of the Corn Laws in prefer- 
ence to the fixed duty to which his party had hitherto clung. 

But a section of the Cabinet was obdurate. Peel in the circumstances 
hesitated to introduce a measure which involved an entire reversal of the 
principles he had maintained when he took office. The thing should be 
done by the Opposition, though with the support of himself and his followers. 
He resigned, but Russell failed to form a ministry. Peel resumed office 
with a Free Trade programme and with an opposition to that programme 
which was now confined to the extreme Protectionists, led nominally by 
Lord George Bentinck but in fact by Benjamin Disraeli. The duties on 
very nearly all raw materials were to be abolished, as well as on sundry 
articles of manufacture. On many others they were to be largely reduced. 
The corn duties were to disappear in three years' time except for a fixed 
registration charge of one shilling. In the interval, to soften the blow to 
the agricultural interest, there was to be a low sliding scale ranging from 
ten shillings when wheat was at forty-eight shillings a quarter or less to 
four shillings when it was at fifty-four shillings or more. In May the 
Corn Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons ; the Lords 
followed the lead of the Duke of Wellington and passed the third reading 
on June 25th. 

But on the same day a Coercion Bill for Ireland was defeated in the 
House of Commons by a combination of Liberals who were opposed to 
the bill in principle and Protectionists who had clamoured for it but were 
determined to wreck the administration. They succeeded. But tne Corn 
Bill received the royal assent ; Peel's task was done ; he resigned, and Lord 
John Russell accepted the task of forming a ministry. 



rv 

AFTER PEEL 

Lord John Russell's ministry was not fruitful of legislation. The 
Liberals were in a minority in the House of Commons and were in effect 
dependent upon the support of the Peelites, the members of the Conserva- 
tive party who had followed their chief in becoming Free Traders. A 
general election during 1847 strengthened the party, but still left it without 
an actual majority. At the outset the domestic interests were absorbed by 
Ireland, where the potato blight reappeared with even increased virulence ; 
and the Government was very much hampered first by its efforts to provide 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 827 

relief and then by the disturbances which followed upon the extreme 
distress. 

The most notable legislative measure for England was the Factory Act 
which bears the name of Fielden, the outcome of the dissatisfaction left 
behind by the Factory Act of the last ministry. Its leading feature was 
the introduction of what was called the ten hours' day. The meaning of 
this was that the legal day as opposed to the night became the period of 
twelve hours from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. Only between those hours therefore 
was the employment of women and young persons permitted, night work 
being prohibited. As it was required that two hours should be allowed 
for meal times, their actual working day became one of ten hours. In 
form, it was no part of the 
purpose of legislation to con- 
trol the hours of adult male 
labour; but the practical effect 
was that the men's hours had 
to be adapted to the altered 
arrangements for women, and 
in effect the Act secured a ten 
hours' day for men. There 
was much vehement opposi- 
tion at the time, accompanied 
by elaborate demonstrations 
that if the hours of work were 
reduced profits would vanish. 
The event proved that the demonstrations were fallacious, because it was 
very soon found that with the shorter hours the work was more efficient 
and the output of the ten hours was worth at least as much as the output 
of the longer period. 

In 1848 the unrest of peoples and nationalities on the European 
Continent broke out in a series of revolutions or insurrections, initiated by 
the deposition of Louis Philippe in France and the proclamation of a 
republic in that country. In Germany the risings were popular, in Italy 
and throughout the heterogeneous Austrian Empire they were nationalist. 
But in these islands there was only a very mild reflex of the disturbances 
which agitated Europe — a singularly futile insurrection in Ireland and in 
England an equally futile demonstration on the part of the Chartists, which 
proved to be the death-blow of the movement. 

Inspired by the bloodless but effective revolution in France, the more 
extreme among the Chartist leaders started a clamorous agitation throughout 
the country. Violent speeches were made, with some talk of the establish- 
ment of a republic. A monster meeting was to be held at Kennington 
Common on April 1 oth, when a monster procession was to carry a monster 
petition to the House of Commons. The alarm in London was extreme, 
but prompt measures were taken to establish security. A huge number of 




Lord John Russell. 
[From the drawing by Maclise. ] 



828 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

special constables were enrolled, among whom was included the French 
exile Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the great Emperor. Under the 
direction of the Duke of Wellington London was thoroughly but not too 
ostentatiously prepared to deal with a desperate insurrection. The Chartist 
leaders were warned that their procession would not be permitted to pass 
the Thames. The monster meeting mustered only some thirty thousand, 
the leaders took to heart the polite but emphatic warnings they received, 
the procession did not march into London, and the petition was conveyed 




The Monster Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10, 1848. 
[From a print in the " Illustrated London News" of 1848 made after a daguerrotype.] 

to the House in a cab. Inspection proved that an enormous proportion 
of the two million signatures were fictitious, and the terrifying spectre of 
Chartism as a revolutionary movement collapsed amid derision into utter 
insignificance. 

The only other domestic event of political importance which needs to 
be recorded here was the death of Sir Robert Peel in 1850. His career 
had been unique, though that of his disciple Gladstone offers some 
resemblances. Born a Tory, a ministerialist in the days when the reaction 
was predominant, he passed his whole political life in gradually shedding 
his original political assumptions and adopting views to which he had once 
been antagonistic. Every definite measure with which his name is associ- 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 829 

ated was one which had been advocated by his opponents ; to nearly every 
one he had himself long offered convinced opposition, from Catholic 
Emancipation to the abolition of the Corn Law. Each of those measures 
he carried when at the head or almost at the head of a Government 
representing a party which only accepted them with extreme reluctance ; 
but in every case he acted upon the clear conviction that the measure, 
whether popular or not, had become a necessity of state. Few men have 
the courage openly to declare themselves converts to views of which they 
have been open and prominent opponents. That rare courage Peel pos- 
sessed ; and though in his own day it subjected him to sneers and jibes, 
to bitter criticism, and to the vitriolic denunciations of Disraeli, the master 
of bitter speech, in the hour of his death there was none who doubted that 
he had acted throughout with absolute sincerity of conviction, with a majestic 
disregard of his own interest and his own popularity, and with a single eye 
to the public good. 

The Russell Government survived for eighteen months after Peel's 
death. Its end was hastened by the compulsory retirement of Lord 
Palmerston from the Foreign Office, where his autocratic disregard of the 
right of his sovereign and his colleagues to information and consultation on 
high matters of policy at last became intolerable both to the colleagues and 
to the sovereign. He got his revenge — "Tit for tat with Johnny Russell," 
as he said — a couple of months later by helping the Opposition to defeat the 
Government on a bill for constituting a militia. Lord Derby, formerly 
known in the House of Commons as Lord Stanley, accepted office as 
leader of the Conservative party, with Disraeli as his Chancellor of the 
Exchequer and leader in the House of Commons ; though the old Con- 
servatives were still very far from trusting the man whom most of them 
regarded as an adventurer, though one who had rendered great services 
to the party and was conspicuously, beyond all comparison, its cleverest 
member. 

The independence of Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office, even in 
the last Liberal administration, had been a constant source of friction in 
the Cabinets. While always maintaining the Canningite position that each 
European state should be left to settle its own domestic affairs without the 
application of compulsion by other states, he had no compunction about 
tendering unasked advice which often aroused irritation in foreign chancel- 
leries. But if his activities seemed meddlesome and, on some occasions, 
dangerous, his buoyant assumption that Great Britain was entitled to 
express her own opinions with entire freedom and was quite capable of 
backing them by force of arms if she thought fit to do so was not un- 
popular. His self-assertiveness was the cause of Russell's failure to form a 
Liberal government at the end of 1845, since Lord Grey refused to join the 
Cabinet if Palmerston went to the Foreign Office. In 1846, however, Lord 
Grey withdrew his objection. The European convulsion of 1848 again 
gave Palmerston scope for his activities ; the sympathies of Britain with 



830 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the popular and nationalist movements were vigorously expressed, though 
without much actual influence on the course of events ; and England 
became an asylum for many refugees from despotic governments and for 
revolutionary propagandists, while the monarchical governments were ex- 
tremely indignant, because in their eyes Palmerston was fostering anarchy 
and revolution in their dominions. 

In 1849 he was hotly attacked in Parliament both by the non-interven- 
tionists, who protested against his meddlesome policy, and by the Radical 
sympathisers with the revolutionary movements, who were of opinion that 
British intervention ought to have been carried much further. Palmerston, 
however, successfully vindicated his position on the ground that on the one 
hand it was the imperative duty of Britain to express her opinions emphati- 
cally and forcibly, but that on the other hand it was not her business to 
embark on hostilities in order to give those opinions effect. The attack, 
however, was renewed when Palmerston sent a British fleet to the Piraeus 
to coerce the Greek government in connection with what was known as 
the Don Pacifico incident. The house of Don Pacifico, a British subject 
resident in Greece, had been sacked by a mob ; there were other claims of 
British subjects against the Greek government which it persistently ignored. 
There was an unfortunate misunderstanding with France, which had en- 
deavoured to mediate. Again Palmerston was attacked for the high- 
handed methods which he had adopted. Nevertheless, he again vindicated 
himself in a speech which won the warm admiration even of those 
who, like Sir Robert Peel, disapproved of his action. It was not his policy 
but his personal independence which caused his dismissal. 

Shortly after the great debate just referred to, Lord Palmerston's inter- 
ference on his own responsibility in the extremely complicated German 
question of Schleswig-Holstein, on lines which were by no means pleasing 
either to her Majesty or to the Prince Consort, caused the queen to send 
a memorandum to the Prime Minister protesting against the Foreign 
Secretary's arbitrary methods, and requiring that he should give distinct 
information to her as to his proposed action in any given case, and that 
when that action had been sanctioned it should not be modified without 
her knowledge. Palmerston formally accepted the rebuke, but made little 
alteration in his practice; and before the end of 1 851 he sent despatches 
and instructions in connection with the coup d'etat by which Louis 
Napoleon had just seized the supreme power in France, without informing 
either the queen or his colleagues. It was this which caused the queen 
and Lord John Russell to insist upon his resignation. 

The newly formed ministry of Lord Derby held office only on 
sufferance ; the Peelites refused to join them as they had refused to join 
the Liberals ; and it was only by conciliating Peelites and moderate 
Liberals that the Government could remain in being. There was therefore 
no possibility of a return to Protection. The situation was not effectively 
changed by a slight increase in the numbers of the party at a general 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 831 

election ; and although Disraeli pledged himself to the maintenance of 
Free Trade, the Government was defeated on its financial proposals. Lord 
Derby resigned, and a coalition was formed between the Liberals and 
the Peelites, with the Peelite Lord Aberdeen as the head of the ministry, in 
the last week of 185 1. 

A few weeks before, the old Duke of Wellington had passed away. A 
strong man whom his soldiers had trusted utterly but never loved, a states- 
man who might have been a great emperor but was wholly unfitted for 
party politics, a public servant who set his duty to the Crown and to the 
state above all other considerations, the Duke was in the ordinary sense 
of the term a political failure ; but his failure was more honourable than 
most other men's success. In his later years he won a popular esteem 
and even affection which had been denied him in his day of triumph. In 
the hour of his death all men of all parties united to honour and to mourn 
for the Great Duke as they had honoured and mourned for no other since 
the death of Chatham. 



V 

IRELAND 

The long-deferred measure of Catholic Emancipation, while it remedied 
a very serious grievance, failed to bring peace to Ireland or adequately to 
solve the religious problem in that country. The preservation of the 
established Anglican Church had been an express part of the Treaty of 
Union, but the maintenance of the Church depended upon tithes which 
were paid by the occupants of the soil of whom the vast majority were 
Roman Catholics. To them, therefore, at least, it appeared a monstrous in- 
justice that they should be compelled to contribute to the support of a 
Church to which they did not belong, while the Church to which they did 
belong was unsupported. Daniel O'Connell, the " Liberator," had as a 
very young man begun his public career as an opponent of the Union ; 
and when Catholic Emancipation had been won, mainly it might be said 
by the skill with which he had conducted the agitation in its favour, it was 
not long before he placed the Repeal of the Union in the forefront of his 
demands for Ireland. 

But Repeal was forced into the background again by the much more 
acute agitation which developed into what was called the tithe war, the 
resistance of the peasantry to the payment of the obnoxious burden. That 
resistance, which in itself was obviously and manifestly justified in the 
eyes of one political school, had in the eyes of another " no semblance of 
justification in law or reason," and it was accompanied by all the familiar 
forms of outrage and violence, the persistent refusal of witnesses to give 
evidence, and the persistent refusal of juries to convict upon any evidence. 



832 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Lord Grey's Government, fronted by the usual dilemma, introduced one of 
those vigorous repressive measures which came to be known as Coercion 
Bills, which was successful enough in its immediate effect ; but it was 
followed by the remedial proposals for the commutation of tithe into a 
charge not upon the occupants of the soil but upon the landowners, a 
redistribution of the funds appropriated to the Irish Church, and the 
appropriation of the surplus to educational purposes irrespective of creed. 
This proposal, in conjunction with that for the renewal of the Coercion Act, 
broke up the Grey Cabinet, and led to the formation of the first Melbourne 
ministry, which was in its turn displaced after a brief interval by that of 
Peel and Wellington. 

Peel introduced a bill for the commutation of tithes, but the bill was 
defeated because it rejected the principle of appropriation. The Melbourne 
ministry returned to power, but its appropriation clause was rejected by 
the House of Lords ; so in 1838 the Liberals accepted the situation and 
passed the bill for simple commutation. When the tax was no longer 
exacted from the tenants themselves but from the landlords it ceased to be 
felt as a pressing grievance. 

The return of Melbourne was accompanied by that compact or under- 
standing with O'Connell which was fiercely denounced by the Opposition, 
but had at least for the time being an undeniably pacificatory effect. The 
Liberator suspended his demand for repeal. Nevertheless the third or 
agrarian grievance, the antagonism between landlords and tenants, again 
rose into painful prominence. On the one side many landlords, often with 
excellent excuse from the economic point of view, evicted large numbers of 
tenants in order to put in their places more efficient and more satisfactory 
cultivators ; on the other hand, the tenants resisted the payment of rent and 
subjected both the landlords and the new tenants to all manner of out- 
rages. The indignation of the landlords was increased by the Under- 
Secretary, Thomas Drummond. Drummond, a vigorous administrator, 
was convinced of the necessity for a strong central control, and reorganised 
the magistracy and the police on lines which greatly strengthened the 
Castle government and did much for the preservation of law and order ; 
but he was antagonistic to the landlords as a class, and his pronouncement 
that property had " rights as well as duties " at a moment when the 
popular turbulence had reached a very high pitch was regarded by them at 
least as an incentive to violence and disorder. 

The Melbourne ministry sought to apply in Ireland principles analogous 
to those of the amended Poor Law in England and the English Municipal 
Government Act. But with its fall and the return to power of Sir Robert 
Peel at the end of 1841 the truce between the Irish leader and the imperial 
government came to an end. The demand for Repeal was immediately 
revived ; and from this time forward it never ceased in one form or another 
to be pressed by popular leaders in Ireland as a necessary condition 
without which it was vain to hope that any policy of alternate or combined 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 



«33 



coercion and conciliation could produce peace in that island. Unlike 
the demands arising directly from the religious and the agrarian questions, 
it found no sympathy either in England or Scotland ; and the fact that 
all other Irish demands were associated with it unfortunately tended to 
counteract much of the sympathy which they might otherwise have 
attracted. 

At the outset the Repeal movement seemed languid ; but O'Connell 
brought into play all his influence and all his great powers of organisation. 
The Irish priesthood rallied to him, a fervid group of younger men who 
became known as " Young Ireland " joined him, and the agitation was 
developed on lines which appeared to 
be exceedingly threatening, though 
O'Connell himself was, as always, 
persistent in the repudiation of any 
appeal to violence. Threats of co- 
ercive measures were met by the 
repeated assembly of huge meetings, 
and the agitation was accompanied 
by an increase of crimes and outrages. 
At last O'Connell and others were 
arrested, tried, and condemned to 
long terms of imprisonment on a 
charge of conspiracy. But the ver- 
dict was quashed by the House of 
Peers on the ground that Catholics 
had been improperly excluded from 
the jury panel. 

O'Connell was set at liberty, 
but for whatever reason assumed 
that control which he had so long exercised in Ireland, and which 
now passed to the members of the Young Ireland group, who were very 
much more inclined to extreme and unconstitutional methods than their 
former leader. Peel, on the other hand, always ready to be impressed 
by demonstrations of popular feeling, evidently began to doubt the 
soundness of the position to which he had hitherto clung — to believe 
that there was more justification than he had supposed for the demand for 
remedial measures. The Devon Commission was appointed to investigate 
the land question. Just before the first potato famine in 1845 its report 
was issued, and revealed the extraordinarily unsatisfactory relations between 
landlords and tenants involved by the existing system. The peasant clung 
to the soil partly from sentimental reasons and partly because if he left his 
holding he had nowhere else to go. In order to stay he would agree to any 
terms, though he was by no means equally willing to keep to them. Conse- 
quently an immense proportion of the land was rack-rented far above its 
proper value. A vast quantity of the land was owned by absentee landlords 

3 G 




Daniel O'Connell. 
[From the painting by T. Garrick.] 

a less aggressive attitude and lost 



834 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

whose agents were concerned simply to get the best return they could for 
the landlord. In other and worse cases the effective proprietor was a 
mortgagee, more determined even than the landlord's agent to extort the 
uttermost farthing from the tenant. If the tenant improved his holding at 
his own expense he got no compensation, but was called upon to pay a 
higher rent, because a higher rent would be obtainable from another tenant 
on account of the improvements which he had made. Tenants were fast in 
the toils of money-lenders, and many of the landlords were hopelessly sunk 
in debt. There were many landlords who dealt justly enough with their 
tenants, many more who would have been willing to do so but for their 
own debts ; but the law gave no protection to the tenants. Consequently 
the tenants took the law into their own hands and enrolled themselves in 
the secret societies, which enforced their own code with a severity more 
relentless than that of the law itself. 

The report of the Devon Commission bore no fruit ; for although a 
tentative measure was introduced in the House of Lords to deal with the 
problems which it had exposed, the bill was shelved. Legislative interfer- 
ence with the relations between landlord and tenant was objectionable 
in England to the landed interest, and was opposed to the laissez /aire 
doctrines of commerce which were on the verge of achieving their triumph. 
Nothing therefore was done. At the same time Peel introduced measures 
which were intended to pacify religious hostilities, but actually had the 
opposite effect. A large grant was made to the College of the Maynooth, 
where candidates for the Catholic priesthood were trained ; Protestants in 
England and Ireland denounced the endowment of Roman Catholicism. 
A number of colleges were set up on non-sectarian principles ; Catholics 
joined Protestants in denouncing the " Godless colleges." 

Then came the potato famine, with the misery, destitution, and starva- 
tion which followed in its train. Starving men do not stop to reason, and 
crime as well as famine stalked through the country. Peel strove to relieve 
the destitution, even while the extreme advocates of laissez /aire proclaimed 
the vanity and the folly of interfering with the law of demand and supply ; 
but at the same time he proceeded to introduce another Coercion Bill for 
the preservation of order, to the indignation of the advanced Liberals. 
With them the Protectionists united, bent on vengeance for the Corn Bill, 
and on the day when the Lords passed the Repeal of the Corn Law the 
Commons threw out the Government Coercion Bill. Peel resigned and 
Russell took office. 

But for the second time the potato plague smote the land even more 
cruelly than before. The Government made immense efforts to meet the 
calamity. It started relief works, in themselves for the most part of no 
permanent utility. Private sympathy and charity came to its aid, and 
much was undeniably done to reduce the appalling effects of the catas- 
trophe. But the rigid free-traders of those days recognised no difference 
between a working policy and an emergency policy; there was no relaxa- 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 835 

tion of the principle that the supply of food must be left to the ordinary 
operations of trade, and the ordinary operations of trade did not reach 
the remotest and poorest districts. Relief, too, was granted only under 
extremely stringent conditions, and numbers of tenants were practically 
obliged to surrender their holdings in order to qualify for obtaining it. 
Crowds of emigrants flocked out of the country, and the census of 1851 
showed that the population of Ireland had been reduced by not less than 
two millions. And if many of the Irish landlords behaved, as undoubtedly 
they did, with a splendid generosity, there were others who used the law 
mercilessly to effect on their estates clearances which they hoped would 
enable them to plant the soil with a more efficient tenantry and to turn 
their land to a more profitable account. The actual effect was that both 
agrarian antagonisms between tenants and landlords and national anta- 
gonisms between Irish and English were embittered and intensified. Out- 
rages multiplied again, and in 1848 desperation produced a futile insurrection 
headed by Smith O'Brien. It was suppressed without difficulty, but in- 
creased the general soreness, which also inevitably resulted from the inevit- 
able Coercion Bill. Nor did the Government attempt to meet the problem 
by treating the system of land tenure as the root of the evil ; it contented 
itself instead with passing the Encumbered Estates Act, which removed 
indeed a large number of the poverty-stricken landlords whose existence 
as landlords made improvement impossible, but at the same time left their 
places to be taken by a new class of landlords generally disposed to treat 
their estates on strict commercial principles, with no inclination to sym- 
pathise with the tenantry or to recognise any rights not secured to them 
by the law. 

VI 

THE COLONIES AND AMERICA 

The early years of Queen Victoria's reign form a very definite epoch in 
the history of British colonial development. In effect during those years 
the more important colonies all acquired an advanced degree of autonomy. 
Some of them in 1833 were possessed of legislative assemblies, but even in 
the most advanced of them those assemblies were in part nominated, and 
in every case the executive government was responsible to the governor 
and to the Crown, not to the legislature. That is to say, the administrative 
offices were all held at the Crown's nomination and did not change hands 
with the changes of party predominance in the Chambers. The situation, 
in fact, was very much like that in England before the system of party 
government came into full play. In the course of the next twenty years 
all the leading colonies had acquired elective legislative assemblies, and in 
nearly all of them ministries were practically constructed in accordance 
with the party majority in the legislature. 



836 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

The change began with Canada, where discontent was already becoming 
rife before the Reform Bill was passed in England. Both in Upper and 
in Lower Canada the cause of discontent lay largely in the fact that the 
administrative offices had become the virtual monopoly of a few families. 
In Lower Canada the trouble was intensified because these predominant 
families were British, whereas the mass of the population was of French 
blood, French in its ideas, traditions, and language. The development of 
the great republic on the south fostered advanced political ideas. Both in 
Upper and Lower Canada the elected legislative assembly raised an insistent 
demand for increased control over administration, and claimed that the 




Map of the Dominion of Canada 

Second Chamber also should be an elected instead of a nominated body, 
a change which in Lower Canada would have ensured an overwhelming 
French preponderance. In 1837 the troubles culminated in an armed 
revolt in Lower Canada known as Papineau's Rebellion, from the politician 
who was its recognised leader. Even advanced Canadian opinion did not 
in fact approve of such extreme action ; the revolt was suppressed with- 
out difficulty, and a corresponding attempt at insurrection in the Upper 
Province scarcely made head at all. The home government adopted an 
unprecedented course. It suspended the constitution of the Canadas, and 
despatched a commission, invested with the supreme control, to investigate 
the whole question of Canadian discontent, and to conduct the government 
pending the results of the enquiry. 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 837 

The Governor-in-Chief and High Commissioner was Lord Durham; 
but at the instance of the Opposition restrictions were placed upon the 
absolute powers with which it was originally intended to invest him. He 
was a man of strong and independent personality, very self-confident and 
somewhat arrogant, a difficult colleague who made many, enemies, hold- 
ing views which in England were regarded as dangerously advanced, but 
endowed with keen penetration. On his arrival in Canada he was faced 
with the difficulty of dealing with the political prisoners. In existing cir- 
cumstances it would have been impossible that their trial in the ordinary 
course should have satisfactory results. Therefore, on his own responsibility 
he issued an ordinance banishing those of the rebels who had fled over the 
frontier, while those who were in his hands were deported to the Bermudas. 
Members of both groups were forbidden to return to Canada upon pain of 
death until permission should be granted. With the way thus cleared he 
proceeded, with the aid of his council, to investigate the whole situation 
and to prepare a report upon it for the home government. In his banish- 
ment ordinance however he had exceeded his powers; a hot attack was. 
opened upon him in England ; and the Melbourne Government, with a 
small and precarious majority in the Commons and a hostile majority in 
the Lords, gave way. Lord Durham was recalled, and the governorship 
was placed in the hands of Sir John Colborne. Durham, on his departure,, 
issued a very injudicious proclamation, which was virtually an attack upon 
the Government which had deserted him. Canadian opinion was strongly 
on the side of the man whose sympathetic grasp of the situation in Canada 
had been made evident; nevertheless Durham had ruined his own career, 
and died shortly afterwards. 

Colborne conducted the administration with ability and firmness. A 
fresh attempt at insurrection was promptly suppressed, and raids from the 
United States were sharply dealt with. Durham had sealed his own 
political fate, but he had done his work for Canada. A bill providing a 
new constitution for the colony was introduced and passed in 1840, and 
this Canadian Act of Reunion adopted his report almost in its entirety. 
He had seen that the prime necessity was the establishment of a national 
Canadian sentiment in the place of the existing local and racial sentiment. 
The two Canadas were united under a single legislature, and endowed with 
practically complete' powers of self-government, while local government 
was put in the hands of local elective bodies. The Second Chamber, though 
enlarged, still consisted of nominees, and the executive government was still 
in form responsible to the Crown and not to the legislature. Nevertheless, 
before long the powers of the legislature predominated, and except in 
matters of imperial concern Canada had in a few years become a com- 
pletely self-governing state with " responsible " government. The same 
course was followed in the maritime provinces of New Brunswick and 
Nova Scotia. 

In Jamaica also at the beginning of the queen's reign serious difficulties 



838 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

arose mainly as a consequence of the Act for the Emancipation of Slaves. 
The arrangement establishing the system of what was called apprenticeship 
for a term of years, in order to allow a gradual adjustment to the con- 
ditions of complete emancipation, carried with it serious temporary evils ; 
for the slave-owner, whose slaves were valuable property, had a direct 
inducement to take some care of the lives and health of his chattels, but 
there was no such inducement in the case of "apprentices" who were not 
marketable property. The planter class who monopolised political power 
were induced by pressure from England reluctantly to proceed to 



" l 




Australia and Tasmania. 



immediate emancipation ; but the consequence was immediate and violent 
friction between them and the newly emancipated blacks. The result again 
was that the Melbourne ministry proposed to suspend the Jamaica constitution 
for five years. The opposition encountered led to Melbourne's resignation 
and the temporary interregnum marked by the bedchamber incident. 
When Melbourne returned to office, a new Jamaica Bill left the assembly 
the opportunity of avoiding a suspension of the constitution, and by the 
judicious management of Lord Metcalfe, who was sent out as governor, the 
crisis was tided over. 

Turning now to the most remote quarter of the globe, we find the 
Australasian colonies steadily expanding. The year 1834 saw the begin-^ 




j^^^siags 



GREAT COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE, IN 1857 
From a view published in 1857. 




GREAT COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE, IN I912 
From a photograph. 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 839 

nings of the colony which afterwards was named Victoria, and its capital, 
Melbourne, was founded in 1837. As yet it was an offshoot of New 
South Wales and was administered by officials under the New South Wales 
government. South Australia was colonised from England in 1834; its 
capital, Adelaide, took its name from William's queen. In 1839 New 
Zealand was annexed, completing the list of the Australasian colonies, since 
the settlement of Queensland and of Western Australia had been com- 
menced in the previous decade. 

The convict settlements with which the colonisation had originated had 
now become a serious drawback. In the settlements begun later than 
1829 there were no convicts; and transportation to New South Wales 
ceased in 1840, to Queensland in 1849, and to Tasmania in 1853. The 




Gold-seekers at Bathurst, Western Australia, on their way to the fields at Ophir, 1851= 
[From a print published at Sydney, N.S.W., in 1851.] 

Canadian troubles in fact awakened the British Government to the wisdom 
of giving the great Australasian settlements the status of free self-governing 
..colonies. It was not that the modern imperial conception had taken hold 
of men's minds ; the idea was rather that the principle of self-government 
ought to be applied to all British communities which were sufficiently 
advanced to admit of it. Free self-government was incompatible with 
the use of the colonies as convict settlements ; hence the gradual abolition 
of the system. 

Hitherto every colony in Australia had been controlled by a governor 
with a small nominated council, the council being primarily merely con- 
sultative, though by degrees the arbitrary powers of the governor became 
limited. In the year 1842 came the beginnings of representation in New 
South Wales. The legislative council was enlarged, and two-thirds of the 
members were elected. The movement towards self-government was not 



840 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

at first rapid, but a great change came over the character of the Australian 
population with the discovery of gold-fields, which brought in a rush of 
immigrants. In 1854 the four most highly organised of the colonies were 
given responsible government in full measure, their several constitutions 
varying in accordance with the wishes they had severally expressed. In 
every case one chamber was wholly elective, though the composition of the 

second chambers differed. 
Each colony had its governor, 
but in each the executive was 
responsible to the legislature. 
Thenceforth they, like Canada, 
were virtually independent states 
except as concerned relations 
with foreign Powers. 

The story of New Zealand 
requires separate attention. The 
Maoris, the native population of 
those islands, were an advanced 
race infinitely superior to the 
"black-fellows" of Australia and 
Tasmania both physically and 
intellectually. The annexation 
of New Zealand was carried out 
after the Treaty of Waitangi, an 
agreement made with the native 
chiefs. The relations between 
the Maoris and the British 
settlers occupy a much more 
prominent position than corre- 
sponding questions in Australia. 
There the natives were primitive 
nomads, without anything which 
could be called organisation. 
The Maori, on the other hand, lived in a community which had quite de- 
finite conceptions with regard to law and to property ; he was no doubt a 
barbarian, but he had a definite civilisation of his own. When the Maori 
chiefs made their bargain they knew what the bargain meant, and they ex- 
pected the white man to keep it. They were to be under the protection of 
the Queen of England. The land was to remain, as it was at the time, 
specifically the property of the tribes. Only the tribe could alienate it ; no 
individual chief or other person had power to do so. And if a tribe was 
willing to part with or sell any of its land, the only recognised legal pur- 
chaser, the only person who could acquire possession from the tribe, was 
to be the governor representing the queen. Only from the governor 
could the individual white man obtain land in New Zealand. In Australia, 




Map of New Zealand. 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 841 

on the contrary, no one had ever dreamed of regarding an inch of the soil 
as the property of any individual native or group of natives. 

Unfortunately, would-be settlers ignored the treaty, under the mistaken 
impression that they had to deal with merely ignorant savages. They bought 
land for themselves which they had no right to do, from chiefs who had no 
power to sell it. The Maoris protested and backed their protests by force. 
Only the interference of the then acting governor, who recognised the 
essential justice of the Maori position, prevented the white men from being 
driven into the sea. The situation, however, remained extremely dangerous 
until the arrival, in 1845, of one of the greatest of all British colonial ad- 
ministrators, George Grey, who had already proved his capacity as governor 
of South Australia. Grey resolutely insisted on the terms of the Treaty of 
Waitangi, suppressed the acquisition of land by irregular means, won the 
confidence of the Maori chiefs, and brought them to aid him in suppressing 
those who continued recalcitrant, when they saw that he had established 
control over his own countrymen. The completeness of his self-reliance 
was again demonstrated and justified when the home authorities supplied 
New Zealand with an unsatisfactory constitution. Grey refused to put it 
in force until his own views had been taken into consideration. So effec- 
tive was his protest that the constitution was withdrawn ; and ultimately in 
1852 his own scheme was practically accepted establishing responsible 
government analogous to that which was already in force in Canada, and 
was set up two years later in the four leading colonies of Australia. 

Eventful also were these years in the third great field of British colonial 
enterprise, South Africa. The history of South African problems cannot 
be fairly grasped without a preliminary sketch of some of the elements 
which generated them. In the first place it must be understood that the 
original native inhabitants of the Cape where the Dutch colonists had 
planted themselves were not negroes but mainly Hottentots, a yellow- 
skinned race entirely distinct from the negroes, though possibly having a 
mixture of negro blood. Beyond the borders of the colony, inland and on 
the east coast from Natal up to the Portuguese territory, were the tribes of 
Bantus, otherwise called Kaffirs — negro people of a very fine physique, 
savages certainly, but often with a social and especially a military 
development which had passed far beyond a rudimentary stage. Com- 
paratively but only comparatively speaking the southern tribes were peace- 
ful agriculturists upon whom the ultra-military tribes of the Zulus and the 
Matabele were pressing from the north. Apart from the subject Hottentots, 
however, there was in the Cape Colony a considerable black slave popula- 
tion not drawn from the Kaffirs but imported. 

Now in 1834 the Dutch at the Cape were already irritated by the com- 
parative anglicising of the institutions of the colony. In 1834 came the 
Act for the Emancipation of the Slaves, for which the farmers were shortly 
to find that they were to receive compensation extremely inadequate from 
their point of view. Also for the past fifty years there had been periodical 



842 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

collisions with the Kaffirs, who were with difficulty held within their own 
borders, and collisions became more frequent in consequence of the planting 
of many British settlers in the eastern regions on the Kaffir border. With 

the exception of the mis- 
W^l sionaries, every one, 

1 British and Dutch alike, 

regarded the Kaffirs as 
dangerous savages who 
could only be kept in re- 
straint by fear ; but the 
humanitarian spirit was at 
this time extremely active 
in England, where the 
missionaries had the ear 
of the public. Hence just 
at this time the governor, 
Sir Benjamin Durban, re- 
ceived positive instruc- 
tions which, in effect, 
precluded him from such 
a demonstration of force 
as was needed to preserve 
peace on the Border. The 
result was that at Christ- 
mas time a horde of 
Kaffirs poured across the 
Fish River, robbing, raid- 
ing, and murdering. Of 
course there was a war, 
and of course the Kaffirs 
were beaten ; but even 
then the instructions from 
home were on the same 
lines as before. None 
of the precautions con- 
sidered necessary on the 
spot were to be taken. The Kaffirs were not to be irritated by the 
overbearing white man. 

The cup of the Boers or up-country Dutch farmers was full. The 
English had disturbed their time-honoured institutions, adopting an air of 
superiority. They had robbed them of their slaves. Now they would 
neither allow them to protect themselves against the bloodthirsty Bantu 
nor provide them with protection. Therefore they would go forth into the 
wilderness, shaking off the dust of their feet against the British as the 
children of Israel departed from Egypt to find the Land of Promise. So 




Map of South Africa. 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 843 

the Great Trek began. Hundreds of Boer families — men, women, and 
children, with their cattle and their baggage waggons — crossed the Orange 
River, which was virtually the boundary of the colony, and marched away 
into the interior to seek independence. It did not strike them that they 
were British subjects, and would not cease to be British subjects merely 
because they had removed themselves into barbarian territory. 

In those parts the native tribes lived in deadly fear of the Matabele 
army, which had recently taken possession of the country beyond the Vaal. 
The enterprising Boers crossed the Vaal, were duly attacked by vast 
hordes of Matabele, and, righting with dogged obstinacy within their 
" laager," routed them with terrific slaughter. The Matabele retired 
beyond the next great river, the Limpopo. 




Port Natal in 1S52, and the arrival of the first mail steamer. 
[From a drawing made in 1852.] 

Another set of the emigrants crossed the eastern mountain range called 
the Drakensberg, and descended into what is now the colony of Natal. 
They negotiated with Dingan, the king of the mighty warrior tribes of the 
Zulus, to procure land from him. He received their envoys with fair 
words and promises, then suddenly fell upon them and slaughtered them. 
Then he launched his legions against the nearest Boer camp. Only one of 
the four hundred souls there escaped to give warning to the rest of the 
emigrants, who were thus able to beat off the next attack. But it was not 
till many months had passed and many lives had been lost that an over- 
whelming defeat was inflicted upon Dingan upon " Dingan's Day," beside 
the stream thenceforth known as the Blood River. 

But the Boers had hardly proclaimed a republic in what was now 
in effect conquered territory, when the British government at the Cape 



844 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

decided that the conquered territory belonged to Great Britain. The Boers 
in sullen resentment again retired across the Drakensberg, and the British 
established the colony of Natal. The Boers between the Orange River and 
the Vaal accepted the position of a dependency of the British Crown under 
the name of the Orange River Sovereignty in 1848; but in 1852 the 
home government, by no means anxious to shoulder more extensive 
responsibilities in South Africa, in effect recognised the independence of 
the Boers beyond the Vaal by the Sand River Convention. To complete 
this portion of the story, it may be added that after two years more the 
Orange River Sovereignty was deliberately cut adrift by the home govern- 
ment against the will both of Cape Colony and of the Boers themselves. 
The Orange Free State, as it was now called, was left to work out its own 
salvation, which it did for many years with remarkable success. 

In the course of the colonial policy by this time universally prevalent, 
representative government was thrust upon the Cape Colony in 1853, a 
boon not greatly desired by the colonists themselves. But the executive 
was not yet made responsible to the legislature. 



VII 

INDIA 

When the first Reformed Parliament was opened at Westminster 
Lord William Bentinck was still Governor-General in India. Besides the 
administrative progress recorded in the previous chapter, two other im- 
portant measures are connected with his term of office. All previous 
Governors-General had accepted as axiomatic the principle of Cornwallis 
that only Europeans should be allowed to hold posts of responsibility within 
the British dominion. Under Bentinck's rule the theory was discarded 
while the practice was retained. Race, colour, and religion were no longer 
recognised officially as barriers t:> office ; but as a matter of fact, neither 
while appointment continued to be made by selection, nor at a later period 
when admission to the public services was obtained by competitive examina- 
tions, did the natives of India obtain anything more than a very small share 
in the higher business of government, outside the native states. Neverthe- 
less the official acceptance of the theory was a condition which made the 
official adoption of the practice possible whenever it should seem com- 
patible with the public security. 

The second measure in fact had the same object in view. This was 
the establishment and endowment of an educational system which was to 
imbue the intelligent Eastern mind with the practical wisdom of the West. 
From the study of English science and English literature the natives 
would learn to recognise the superiority of Western civilisation, would imbibe 
Western ideas, and would become fitter for association with the British in 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 845 

the task of government. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a brilliant young 
Whig, who was sent out as legal adviser of the Indian Council in 1834, 
was the most energetic and persuasive promoter of the scheme ; but it 
scarcely answered the precise purposes with which it was initiated. The 
natives who profited by the new education belonged almost entirely to 
a class extremely intelligent but apt to be deficient in the moral qualities 
which the natives of India require in their rulers. Moreover, while they 
duly acquired a literary acquaintance with Western ideas, these did 
not displace the oriental conceptions which were rooted in their minds 
from birth, but were only grafted on to them, bearing a fruit very different 
from that which had been intended. 

Bentinck was succeeded after a brief interval by Lord Auckland, and a 
period unprecedentedly peaceful was followed by one of renewed warfare, 
though the Wars were nearly all beyond the borders of the British 
dominion. 

In the north-west^corner of what is now British India lay the powerful 
and independent Sikh state of the Punjab, which had been consolidated 
and still was ruled by Ranjit Singh. Beyond the mountains was the 
turbulent Afghan nation, beyond Afghanistan lay Persia, and behind 
Persia was Russia, creeping always steadily forward, absorbing new 
territories decade by decade, and, as Palmerston and all Indian statesmen 
believed, aiming at the ultimate appropriation of India itself. Persia was 
still accounted a great power, and half the Mohammedan world regarded 
the Shah of Persia as the lineal head of Islam. The idea then was that 
Russia intended to make a catspaw of Persia. Persia was to be encouraged 
to re-absorb Mohammedan Afghanistan, once a province of its own ; and 
was then to call upon the Mussulmans of India to rise against the British 
ascendency and restore the Moslem supremacy under the aegis of Persia. 
Upon the chaos that would supervene Russia would descend and set up her 
own dominion. 

British attention to Asiatic problems is always fitful ; successive British 
Governments had omitted to pay due regard to the relations between Russia 
and Persia ; Britain had failed in her treaty obligations to support Persia 
against Russian aggression ; and before 1830 the Persian government had 
made up its mind that its true interests lay not in a British but in 
a Russian alliance. , In 1837 a Persian army marched upon Herat, the 
great city of Western Afghanistan. Unhappily Lord Auckland and his 
advisers misread the situation in Afghanistan, where Dost Mohammed, 
the ruler of Kabul, was not at all inclined to submit either to Persian or to 
Russian domination. The true British policy would have been to give the 
Dost vigorous support in resisting Persian aggression ; but his attitude was 
misunderstood, and it was believed that he meant to play into the hands of 
Russia. Many years before, Shah Shuja, then reigning over Afghanistan, 
had been driven from the country into British territory, and the power of 
Dost Mohammed's family had then been established. The plan to which 



846 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the Indian government now committed itself was the restoration of Shah 
Shuja to the throne at Kabul as the ally or puppet of the British. 

By September 1838 the stubborn defence of Herat, brilliantly conducted 
under the guidance of a young British officer, Eldred Pottinger, had proved 
too much for the Shah ; the siege was raised and the Persian army retired. 
But although the imminent danger was removed, the British Government 
persisted in its design in defiance of all the most experienced authorities ; 
and in 1839 the British expedition advanced into Afghanistan, Kandahar 
was captured, then Ghazni. Dost Mohammed retreated, Shah Shuja was 
enthroned at Kabul, and then it became evident that his position could 
only be secured by the retention of a great British force and a British 
Resident at the capital. In the next year, 1840, Dost Mohammed surrendered 
to the British and was removed to British territory. Peace apparently 
reigned ; but there was a rude awakening. The chiefs of the Afghan 
tribes had at first been pacified by subsidies, and they were the more 
enraged when the subsidies were withdrawn. The country was soon in a 
state of ferment unperceived by the Resident MacNaghten. In November 
1 84 1 a great riot broke out in Kabul. Allowed to go unchecked, it 
developed into a general insurrection. The commander of the great 
British force at Kabul was hopelessly incompetent, and the Resident was 
compelled to accept an ignominious treaty under which the country was to 
be entirely evacuated by the British, who were to leave hostages behind 
them in the hands of the Afghans. The garrisons at Kandahar, Ghazni, 
and Jellalabad repudiated their orders and refused to budge. MacNaghten 
was murdered, and in midwinter the British — men, women and children, 
civilians and soldiers, numbering some fifteen thousand souls — started on 
their defenceless march from Kabul only to be massacred in the mountain 
passes. Of all that host only one escaped, and reached Jellalabad. 

Such was the great disaster which for the moment seemed to threaten 
the very existence of the British power in India. It took place just at the 
moment when Peel's great administration began in England. Lord Ellen- 
borough arrived in India to take Auckland's place, and active steps were 
taken to retrieve the position. The force at Kandahar held its own without 
difficulty ; that at Jellalabad only with extreme difficulty and by distin- 
guished gallantry ; Ghazni surrendered. The first order issued for general 
evacuation was practically cancelled by a second, which instructed General 
Pollock with a relieving force which was entering Afghanistan via Jellalabad 
to effect the evacuation via Kabul. Between April and September Pollock's 
force and Nott's from Kandahar completely demonstrated to the Afghans 
the futility of resistance, and the British flag was again hoisted at Kabul. 
In the meanwhile the luckless Shah Shuja had been assassinated, and now 
the British Government did what it ought to have done in the first instance. 
It restored Dost Mohammed to the throne of Kabul, since he was obviously 
the chief incomparably the best fitted to hold the reins of power ; and it 
made with him the firm alliance which he would gladly have accepted at 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 847 

the outset,, To that alliance he remained admirably faithful, and his loyalty 
proved of immense service in the troublous years that followed. The 
situation was saved, but British prestige had received a terrible blow in 
spite of the triumphal processions and grandiloquent proclamations by 
which Ellenborough endeavoured to persuade himself and the natives of 
India that the overwhelming power of the British had been magnificently 
vindicated. 

Another demonstration was given in the next year, 1843, the one 
example of a deliberate act of wanton aggression in our Indian annals. 
The annexation of Sindh was not inaccurately described by its perpetrator, 
Sir Charles Napier, as a piece of beneficent ras- 
cality. Sindh lies on the Lower Indus, beyond 
what was then the sphere of British dominion. 
Napier, sent to this region as Resident or Agent, 
picked a quarrel with the Amirs, routed their 
forces in a brilliant campaign at Miani, and the 
annexation of the whole territory followed. Only 
a few months later came another campaign, this 
time against Gwalior., Gwalior was the capital of 
the Maratha Maharaja Sindhia, who at this time 
was a child. The Gwalior government controlled 
what was now the one powerful native army in 
India outside the Punjab. The effective ruler at 
Gwalior was the Rani, the young widow of the 
last Sindhia. The actual Sindhia was a young boy, 
whom she had adopted ; for, by a very singular 
fatality, no Sindhia had ever left an heir of his body ; in every case the 
successor had been a child adopted in accordance with the Hindu law of 
succession. The Rani's power depended upon her popularity with t'he 
army, so that in "effect the army was the government ; and the army was 
arrogant and aggressive. In the existing circumstances, since the Rani 
seemed determined to pay no heed to the advice or instructions of the 
paramount power, a demand was made that the Gwalior army should be 
reduced and the British subsidiary contingent enlarged. The demand was 
backed by the presence of a considerable British force on the Gwalior 
frontier. The British ultimatum was ignored, the British army crossed 
the border, and in two fiercely fought engagements at Maharajpur and 
Puniar the Rani's forces were shattered. The government was placed in 
the hands of a Council of Regency appointed by the British and practically 
directed by the British Resident, until the young Sindhia should come of 
age. The native army was reduced from forty thousand to nine thousand 
men, and the British contingent, that is to say the sepoy force under 
British officers, was increased to ten thousand. 

The result of a single-combat between Gwalior and the British was 
never doubtful. The real danger lay in the north-west; the real value of 




Dost Mohammed. 
[From a native painting.] 



848 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the Maharajpur campaign lay in the removal of a great hostile force posted 
upon our flank and capable of co-operating very effectively with the Sikhs 
of the Punjab. Had the Sikhs attacked first while the Gvvalior army was 
in full strength the latter would have been able to fall upon the British 
communications, enclose the British army, and threaten the rear of the 
British advance ; and in that case complete disaster might have been the 
result. Speculations on such points, however, are somewhat vain. Lord 
Ellenborough's methods created so much uneasiness that he was recalled 
to make way for Sir Henry Hardinge, who had won his spurs in the 
Peninsula War and was not without administrative experience ; and had 
the Gwalior army still been dangerous he would undoubtedly have taken 
adequate military precautions. 

Hardinge was never in doubt about the menace from the Punjab. 
Ranjit Singh died in 1839, and the Lahore state, as the Punjab was also 
called, was now without any strong central government. The old Maha- 
rajah's chieftainship had been a kind of military despotism based upon an 
army and upon institutions of a very exceptional type. The Sikhs had been 
primarily a religious brotherhood, a sort of reformed sect of Hindus who 
had abjured many of the peculiar institutions of Hinduism, notably that of 
caste. Of diverse races at first, they had become by exclusive association 
for some three centuries a special breed with marked characteristics of 
their own. The brotherhood, subjected to a fierce persecution, had organ- 
ised itself into an army under the name of the Khalsa, and, though forming 
only a small percentage of the population, it had in the latter years of the 
eighteenth century dominated the Punjab. The Sikh army was the one 
great organisation in India which could be called democratic in its structure ; 
but, besides the Khalsa proper, the great chiefs or sirdars could, like 
medieval barons, bring large numbers of their own retainers into the field. 
Working upon this basis and helped by European officers, Ranjit Singh 
had moulded the Khalsa into an army probably the best disciplined and 
the most powerful, at least in comparison with its numbers, ever controlled 
by an Indian monarch. Ranjit's death left the Khalsa completely master 
of the country ; or would have done so if the army had realised its own 
strength and had possessed a directing head. It was not long in realising 
its strength, but it still lacked a head. The new Maharajah was a boy, and 
the reins of power were grasped by his mother, the Rani Jindan, whom Henry 
Lawrence described as the Messalina of the Punjab. After a series of 
intrigues and assassinations the Rani seemed to have established herself and 
her paramour Lai Singh at the head of the government (it may be remarked 
that every Sikh bore the name of Singh), but not without extreme jealousy 
on the part of many of the sirdars ; while the sirdars and the Rani alike 
felt that the really dominant power was the Khalsa. 

The Khalsa knew its own military strength long before it awoke to 
its political power. It had proved itself decisively the master of every 
foe with whom it had fought. Even in Ranjit's day it would have hailed 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 849 

with joy a proposal to challenge the power of the British, but that astute, 
monarch was alive to the vast reserves of force which lay behind the 
British Government in India. But there was no one now who could domi- 
nate the Khalsa, and both the Rani and the sirdars perceived possibilities 
of great gain to themselves if it should hurl itself against the white men. 
If it were beaten its power would be broken, and every man dreamed that 
then his own private ambitions might find an opportunity of realisation. If 
it were victorious the Sikhs would become the masters of India, and every 
Sikh would have his chance. So the army was egged on to challenge fate. 
Early in December 1845 the news reached Sir Henry Hardinge that the 
Sikhs had crossed the river Sutlej, the border-line of the Punjab state. 

Ever since his arrival in India the Governor-General had been preparing 
for this emergency as rapidly as was possible without dangerous ostenta- 
tion. Troops had been concentrated in the north-west provinces and 
in the outposts which guarded the Sikh frontier. Two converging columns 
were promptly on tfee march to effect a junction with the garrison of 
the advanced post at Firozpur. They met the advancing Sikhs at Mudki, 
and after hot fighting drove them off the field. Two days later the advance 
towards Firozpur was renewed, but the way was blocked by a great 
Sikh army which had entrenched itself at Firozshah. The attack was 
delayed till the afternoon in order that the British might be reinforced 
by a column which was on its way from Firozpur. The Commander-in- 
Chief, Sir Hugh Gough, would have attacked at once, but Hardinge con- 
sidered the risk too great, and used the power which he possessed to assume 
the supreme command himself. A furious contest raged long after darkness 
had fallen, but the Sikhs held their entrenchments and the British passed 
a night of intense anxiety, resolved to renew the attack on the morrow, 
but in actual doubt whether they might not be themselves overwhelmed 
and annihilated. The morning brought relief, when the British troops 
rushed the entrenchments to find that the Sikhs had already withdrawn 
under cover of darkness. 

The Sikh invasion was broken ; it was now the turn of the British 
to invade the Punjab. Two months were passed in preparations for 
forcing the passage of the Sutlej, during which there were two sharp 
engagements at Bulowal and Aliwal. Then came the decisive battle at 
Sobraon, where the .Sikhs held the passage of the Sutlej. Only after 
desperate fighting their entrenchments were carried, and the Sikh army 
was driven over or into the river, after which there was no further 
possibility of resistance. 

The British marched to Lahore, bent not on annexation but on 
establishing an efficient government. A Council of Regency was appointed ; 
Henry Lawrence was left as Resident with very large powers of control 
over the administration, which in various frontier districts was delegated 
to subordinate British officers ; a large part of the Sikh army was 
disbanded ; and at the earnest request of the sirdars a considerable British 

3 H 



850 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

force remained in the country. This was to be withdrawn at the end 
of the year ; when once more, at the request of the sirdars, the troops 
were allowed to remain and the administration was virtually placed in 
the hands of Lawrence, under whose powerful and sympathetic rule it 
seemed probable that the country would soon settle down in peaceable 
and orderly fashion. 

Very different was the actual event. At the end of 1847 all seemed 
to promise well. Hardinge, now a Viscount, left India in January, believ- 
ing that there were no serious troubles in store. With him went the 
great administrator of the Punjab. Within four months a flame had 
been kindled which soon blazed into a general insurrection, necessitating 
another sanguinary campaign which ended with the annexation of the 
Punjab and its final absorption into the direct British dominion. 

Lawrence's successor at Lahore was an experienced and capable 
official but of no exceptional power. Hardinge's successor in the 
Governor-Generalship, Lord Dalhousie, was a man of very exceptional 
abilities, but his capacities were still unknown. The veterans of the 
Khalsa were sore at their overthrow, which they still attributed not 
to British superiority but to the treachery of their own leaders. The 
minds of the sirdars were divided ; they resented any other ascendency 
than their own, but they distrusted each other ; they were not sure of 
themselves ; but even though the British had remained in the Punjab 
at their own request they suspected them of intending to establish them- 
selves permanently. Thus when insurrection broke out it was not a 
national movement, but it was in danger of at once becoming so unless 
the British ascendency were forthwith asserted vigorously and decisively. 
It began as a local revolt at Multan. The governor, Mulraj, resigned. 
His resignation was accepted by the official Sikh government at Lahore, 
and two British officers were sent to Multan to take over the administration 
until the new governor should be appointed. The troops in Multan rose, 
murdered the officers, and proclaimed a revolt against the British 
dominion. 

Technically there was no British dominion. The government was the 
Sikh government, acting temporarily under the advice and with the support 
of the British Resident and some British, that is to say Sepoy, regiments. 
The British Government therefore called upon the Sikh government to 
suppress the revolt. A young frontier officer, Herbert Edwardes, hearing 
that British officers at Multan were in danger, but not that they had been 
murdered, at once marched to their rescue from the Derajat, the hill- 
frontier, with a force mainly of the hillmen, who, throughout, showed 
an admirable devotion to their British officers, the more so as they had 
no love for their Sikh masters. He acted on his own responsibility. He 
had already routed the insurgents and driven them into Multan, when he 
was joined by the troops of the Lahore government under the command 
of Sher Singh. It was, however, obvious that those troops could not 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 851 

be trusted, and a British column was presently despatched from Lahore 
to take part in the siege. Dalhousie accepted the view of his com- 
mander-in-chief, Lord Gough, that it would be worse than useless to 
send a small expeditionary force into the Punjab, since it would be super- 
fluous if the insurrection did not become general, and would be annihilated 
if it did. 

The result was that the insurrection did become general. The British 
column from Lahore had hardly joined Edwardes before Multan when 
Sher Singh withdrew with his whole force from the siege and began to 
gather all the old members of the Khalsa to his standard. Some six 
weeks later, Gough, with the army of invasion which he had been 
organising, was in the Upper Punjab seeking to force a decisive battle 
upon Sher Singh. At the crossing of the river Chenab a sharp skirmish 
and a sharp engagement took place at Ramnagar and at Sadulapur ; but 
Sher Singh made good his retreat and entrenched himself at Rassul on the 
river Jhelum. The Sikh army, established in an entrenched position, was not 
to be attacked hastily. Presently, however, Gough advanced, and found 
the enemy, always behind entrenchments, at Chillianwalla, where there 
was a furious engagement with very heavy losses on both sides, and the 
Sikhs were again able to retire to their position at Rassul, though they left 
the British masters of the field of battle, Rassul was impregnable, and 
Gough could only hold Sher Singh under watch. A month later Sher 
Singh, who had received considerable reinforcements, suddenly slipped 
out of Rassul. But in the meanwhile Multan had fallen, and the British 
column was on its way to join the commander-in-chief. A week after his 
march Gough brought Sher Singh to battle at Gujerat, where the Sikh 
army was decisively and finally shattered. The Sikhs accepted the 
situation ; this time they knew that they had had a stand-up fight with the 
British and had been soundly beaten without any treachery on the part of 
their own leaders. Perhaps there was hardly any one except Henry 
Lawrence himself who was not satisfied that the annexation of the Punjab 
was now the only course possible. It was the course adopted by Dalhousie, 
who regarded the new province with an especial favour which it speedily 
repaid. 



VIII 

EARLY VICTORIAN 

In a constitutional monarchy the personality of the monarch, however 
striking it may be, is of less importance in the national history than in 
days and realms in which the Crown directly controls national policy. The 
dates of the accession of kings and queens are no more than convenient 
landmarks, in themselves signalising only minor events. George III. was 



852 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the only one of the Hanoverian kings whose accession marked a 
departure from the normal lines of national development, excepting of 
course his great-grandfather. Although Queen Victoria herself played no 
insignificant part on the stage of history, her succession rather ensured 
continuity of development than gave it a new direction. The characteristics 
of what we call the Victorian Era distinguished her second uncle's reign as 
well as her own. The epoch, the starting-point of the era, is marked by 
the Reform Bill, whether we consider its political or its social aspects, and 
we can legitimately apply the term Early Victorian to the twenty years 
which followed the passing of that measure. 

During those twenty years the Industrial Revolution was carried to 
completion by the huge development of steam traffic both by land and by 
water. Passenger traffic by rail was in effect inaugurated by the opening 
of the Manchester and Liverpool railway in 1830 ; in 1850 all the main 
railway lines were at work. The railroad carried goods in an hour perhaps 










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Open Coaches on the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, 1831. 
[From a print.] 

as far as the old horse haulage conveyed them in a day, and in immensely 
greater quantities at a time. An Act of Parliament in 1844 required the 
railway companies to provide a sufficiency of trains with covered accommo- 
dation for passengers at the rate of a penny a mile — the origin of the 
term " Parliamentary Trains." Forced against their will to provide cheap 
fares, the railway managers very soon found that the innovation increased 
instead of diminishing their profits. The trains were used by thousands of 
passengers, most of whom in the old days would have been obliged either 
to stay at home or to tramp on foot, helped forward by an occasional lift on 
a friendly waggon. The steam-engine drew tons of goods where canals 
had carried them by the hundredweight. The new traffic made its way in 
defiance of aesthetic and academic opposition, and in spite of the great 
financial panics which followed upon excessive inflation especially in 
1845. 

The steamship established itself less rapidly. The first ocean line was 
only opened in 1839, the year after the first passage of the Atlantic com- 
pleted under steam. It is to be remarked that even these first steamers 
covered the distance in only about thrice the time taken by the swiftest 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 853 

modern vessels, while the speed of George Stephenson's locomotive has 
hardly even been doubled. 

Out of the development of steam traffic came the creation in 1840 of 
the Penny Post, carrying with it an enormous increase in correspondence ; 
and immediately after the establishment of the Penny Post came the 
Electric Telegraph. The first telegraphic line in England was set up be- 
tween London and Slough in 1844, and seven years later came the laying 
of the first submarine cable between Dover and Calais. It is a little 
difficult to realise that until Queen Victoria was seated on the throne the 
conveyance of a letter from London to Edinburgh took nearly as long as 
its carriage from London to New York 
fifty years later, and that the journey to 
India might take any time from six to 
* eighteen months instead of something under 
three weeks. 

The most prominent feature in the 
modern industrial world is Trade Unionism. 
The formation of trade unions, combina- 
tions of the workers, primarily for the 
purpose of collective bargaining with the 
masters, became temporarily active after the 
repeal of the Combination Laws in 1825. 
But the movement was checked by the 
repeated failure of strikes owing to lack 
of funds and inefficient organisation. The 
political ideal, the demands formulated 
shortly afterwards in the People's Charter, seemed to the working man 
to promise better than local and sectional combinations. In the thirties, 
however, the movement took new shape. In place of the simple idea of 
the trade union, the combination of the employees in a trade, came the 
idea of the trades union, the combination of workers in several trades. 
Such a combination was the Builders' Union, which sought to unite the 
workmen in all the diverse departments of the building trade, an aggressive 
body which increased the alarm created by its aggressiveness by adopting 
a fantastic and melodramatic ceremonial of initiation. The masters began 
to announce that they would make the repudiation of this trades union a 
condition of employment. Another such union, more far-reaching in its 
conception, was the Grand National Trades Union devised by Robert 
Owen, who, having been an extremely successful and liberal employer of 
labour, developed into the champion of a reformed social order. Capitalism 
and competition were to disappear, and the workers were themselves to be 
the proprietors and controllers of all the materials and machinery of 
production and distribution. 

These unions did in effect undoubtedly increase their power by means 
of intimidation. The accepted doctrine of laissez /aire, as understood by 




Robert Owen. 



854 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the masters, meant that the prosperity of trade depended on the masters 
having an entirely free hand in the control of their business. If combina- 
tions could resist their dictation they had not a free hand, and if the 
workers were coerced against their will by the combinations an unmitigated 
tyranny would be established. In actual fact at this time the alarm of the 
masters was groundless. The unions were invariably beaten if they 
attempted to fight, because the labour market was still largely overstocked, 
and labour, doing battle with capital, requires a war chest which the 
unions did not possess. The masters were commonly strong enough to 
compel the men to renounce the unions as a condition of service by sign- 
ing a declaration known as the Document. But the masters also had the 
whole force of the Government on their side ; the conspiracy laws could 
be applied so as effectively to paralyse the action of the unions, and the 
obviously unjust severity with which the law was applied in some 
particular instances only had the effect of embittering class hostilities. 
Trades Unionism and Trade Unionism were both beaten as aggressive 
methods of fighting capitalism, and from 1838 to 1848 Chartism held the 
field. 

But not altogether. Intelligent working-men saw the futility of wasting 
the union funds on hopeless battles with masters ; but unions and funds 
could be turned to good service on the lines of benefit societies, and on 
those lines their organisation could be steadily and quietly strengthened. 
They ceased to be aggressive, and almost confined themselves to a defensive 
resistance to aggression on the part of the masters. In those employments 
especially where skill and higher intelligence are demanded, the unions set 
themselves to educate their own members and- to study the problems with 
which they had to deal in a scientific spirit. Such unions were no longer 
aggregations of unreasoning and hot-headed men, but bodies of intelligent 
persons who knew what they wanted and had at least a rational idea of 
how it was to be obtained. The new spirit which made trade unionism an 
effective force in the country found its most convincing expression in the 
carefully organised Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which, in 1850, 
brought into a single combination a number of the separate societies then 
existing in Lancashire and in London. The great strike of the engineers in 
1852 on the questions of piece-work and overtime produced an immense 
impression on the public mind, because of the sobriety and discipline with 
which it was conducted. The men were beaten ; they were obliged to 
return to work without gaining what they had demanded ; but they had 
won public sympathy ; their union had not been broken up, and they 
had given the industrial world an invaluable lesson in organisation. 

If the working-men were beginning to realise their own need of educa- 
tion, the country was also slowly beginning to realise that education wai 
becoming a national concern. Hitherto it had been left entirely to private 
enterprise. The schools in which the children of the poor were taught 
were maintained chiefly by the National Church and occasionally by other 



THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT 855 

religious bodies, supported by voluntary contributions. England before 
the Reform Bill, very unlike Scotland, was one of the worst educated 
countries in Europe. The spirit of reform then touched education so far 
that in 1833 the Government ventured upon a grant of £20,000 in its aid, 
to help in the building of a few more schools. Five years later came 
proposals for the formation of a Board or Committee of Education. 

But from the moment when the application of public funds to education 
became a matter of debate the religious difficulty presented itself. It 
appeared to one side that public funds must be distributed and applied 
irrespective of the religious opinions of teachers or pupils. To the other 
side it appeared imperative that the Church should retain its effective con- 
trol, since the teaching of religion was of the 
essence of education, and no teaching could be 
called religious which was not, in modern phrase, 
denominational. Neither side was prepared 
even to consider an educational system from 
which religion was omitted. The Liberal Govern- 
ment only so far got its way that its committee 
was appointed for the distribution of a slightly 
increased grant, which was not actually mono- 
polised as hitherto by the Church schools. The 
subject continued to engage attention periodi- 
cally, and another bill was brought in in 1843 
as part of a Factory Bill. It was wrecked on 
the usual rock, Dissenters and Roman Catholics 
finding it too favourable to the Anglicans, and 
Anglicans finding it too favourable to Dissent. 

In 1847, however, the government grant was increased to £100,000, of 
which the benefit was still withheld from Roman Catholics, and for fifteen 
vears no further steps were taken. 

Both in England and in Scotland religious movements were extremely 
active during this period. The moderation, indifferentism, or rationalism 
prevalent in the eighteenth century had been disturbed by the Wesleyan 
revival and the growth of a more vigorous Evangelicalism in the English 
Church. But now a new fervour of Churchmanship arose within the 
Anglican communion, known as the Oxford or Oriel movement because it 
took its rise in Oxford and especially in Oriel College, or as Tractarianism 
because it found its literary expression in a series of publications called 
Tracts for the Times. The most spiritual of its exponents was John Henry 
Newman, who, with many of his followers, ultimately found refuge and 
rest in the Church of Rome. But in the eyes of the public its most 
prominent figure was that of Dr. Pusey. Essentially it was a re-assertion 
of the Divine authority of the Catholic Church, the Church to whose priest- 
hood the apostolic authority had been transmitted in unbroken continuity 
through the centuries by the rite of ordination. That authority could not 




Dr. Pusey. 
[From a photograph.] 



856 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

be overridden by the state, and no lay jurisdiction could be recognised. 
The sanction for its doctrines and ritual was to be found in the decisions 
of the General Councils of the Church, in the teaching of the early fathers, 
and in the practice of the Church Universal. On this basis doctrines and 
practices which had been condemned as papistical were revived. Whatever 
views may be held with regard to those doctrines and practices the essential 
fact must be recognised that the movement brought a new intensity of 
spiritual life into the Church, while it challenged the essential doctrine of 
Protestantism by claiming not only that the Church was independent of 
the state but that the priesthood were the authoritative intermediaries of 
Divine Grace. The state declined to recognise the claims of the new school 
and continued to assert its own authority; but the Tractarians did not 
adopt the solution of seceding from the establishment and surrendering 
endowments for the sake of spiritual independence. 

This, however, was the more heroic course adopted in Scotland. In 
that country also there was a revival of religious energy, but there was no 
question of dogma or ritual or priesthood. The question was that of the 
right of the state to control the spiritual independence of the congregation. 
The spiritual independence claimed was the right of the congregation to 
choose its own minister, whereas the state, that is to say the law, had 
placed the patronage in private hands. The legal question was carried to 
the highest court of appeal, the House of Peers, and the House of Peers 
upheld the rights of the patrons. Thereupon the party of spiritual in- 
dependence separated itself from the establishment ; a host of ministers 
resigned their livings, departed from their manses, and formed a church 
free from state control — the Free Kirk — whose clergy depended for their 
emoluments entirely upon stipends provided by voluntary contributions. 

The splendour of the last literary period was maintained by new 
writers. Before 1840 Tennyson and Browning had begun to publish 
poetry; before 1850 Tennyson's fame was securely established, though 
many years were to pass before his great rival had won popular recognition. 
Charles Dickens gave a new joy to life with the appearance of the Pickwick 
Papers in the year of Queen Victoria's accession. Thackeray achieved a 
triumph with Vanity Fair eleven years later. Disraeli revealed himself to 
the world in a series of novels before he entered Parliament. Macaulay 
created a prose style which became the model of half the writers in 
England, while Carlyle, Newman, and John Ruskin began to be numbered 
among the prophets. 



CHAPTER XXXV 

THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 

I 



THE CRIMEAN WAR 

The term coalition is one which until the twentieth century had a perfectly 
clear meaning. It meant not a combination of parties in Parliament in 
support of a ministry- whose members are 
drawn from the ranks of one party, but 
the combination in a single ministry of 
members drawn from the ranks of different 
parties. The Liberal Government formed 
by Lord John Russell in 1846 depended 
upon the support of the Peelites, as the 
Melbourne ministry before had virtually 
been established by a compact with 
O'Connell. Lord Aberdeen's ministry was 
what they were not, a coalition ministry 
in the correct sense of the term, because 
the ministers were drawn from the ranks 
of two parties, the Peelites and the 
Liberals. Its chief, Lord Aberdeen, was 
a Peelite, so was its Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, Gladstone. Palmerston was 
not allowed to return to the Foreign 
Office but had to be contented with the 
post of Home Secretary ; he was in fact 
distinctly antagonistic to Aberdeen, who was 
strongly opposed to assuming anything like 
an aggressive attitude in foreign affairs. 
By the not unfamiliar irony of politics 
Aberdeen was the one minister under whose 
leadership the British Empire has been in- 
volved in a European war since Waterloo, 
actually taken at first by Lord John Russell. 

The year 1853 was notable for the first Gladstone budget, in which 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer advanced along the lines of Free Trade. 

857 




The Earl of Aberdeen. 

[From a sketch made in the House of Lords 
in 1854.] 

Palmerston's old place was 



858 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Duties upon some two hundred and seventy articles were either reduced or 
removed. But in a very short time it became evident that foreign not 
domestic affairs were to absorb public attention. 

Early in the year, Nicholas I., the Tsar of Russia, expressed to the 
British ambassador his conviction that the Turkish Empire was lt a. very 
sick man," very near to dissolution. Russia and Britain ought to be agreed 
upon a policy when that contingency should arise ; and if Britain wanted 
Egypt and Crete for her share he should not object. Britain did not 
receive the proposal with any favour ; she had no desire to see Russia in 
possession of Constantinople, with an unlimited fleet in the Black Sea ready 
to pass through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean whenever it might 
suit her. She adhered to the policy of maintaining the integrity of the 
Turkish Empire, a fact which Nicholas failed to grasp. It was evidently 
his intention to hasten the dissolution which he had persuaded himself to 
regard as inevitable, and he found his opportunity in the differences 
between the Greek and Latin Christian Churches in Palestine. 

France had a traditional and purely sentimental theory that she was 
the protector of Latin Christianity in the East ; Russia had a traditional 
and exceedingly practical theory that she was the protector of Christians 
in general, but particularly those of the Greek Church. Louis Napoleon 
had just made himself Emperor of the French, and it was necessary for him 
to justify his position in the eyes of France and of the world by an active 
assertion of French claims. When Greeks and Latins quarrelled over 
points of precedence, Nicholas on one side and Napoleon III. on the other 
brought pressure to bear upon the Porte. The Porte tried to satisfy both, 
and succeeded in pleasing neither, with the result that the Tsar in effect 
put forward a claim to be formally recognised as the protector over all the 
Christian subjects of the Porte. The Porte refused the demand, which no 
sovereign state could possibly have tolerated, whereupon Russian troops 
crossed the river Pruth and occupied the trans-Danubian principalities. 
Hostilities were delayed by an attempt on the part of the Western powers 
to effect a pacification. They addressed a joint note to Russia and Turkey. 
Russia accepted it, but Turkey pointed out that it might be interpreted as 
confirming the Tsar's most extravagant demands. The Powers, who had 
no such intention, thereupon withdrew the note, Turkey demanded the 
evacuation of the Danubian provinces, Russia did not move, and at the end 
of October 1853 the two countries were technically at war. 

Now after the episode of the " sick man " it was impossible for the 
British Government to doubt that Russia was bent on her programme of 
the partition of the Turkish Empire, according to the precedent of the 
partition of Poland. The Tsar, on the other hand, was comfortably con- 
vinced that Britain was wholly given over to commercial pursuits and 
would, at any rate, stop short of armed intervention, a view which he 
might not have taken had Palmerston been at the Foreign Office, where 
Russell's place had been taken by Lord Clarendon, Russell himself being 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 859 

occupied at the conferences of the Powers. The French Emperor, how- 
ever, was in hearty co-operation with the British Government, and was 
perhaps rather eager for war than otherwise, since military glory was 
almost a necessity to the imperial successor of the first Napoleon. 

In October the British and French fleets were ordered to the Bosphorus 
to protect their national interests ; Turkey declared war upon Russia, and 
the Tsar announced that he was merely holding the trans-Danube princi- 
palities as a material guarantee, and 
would not take the offensive against 
Turkey. Almost immediately after- 
wards the Russian Black Sea Fleet 
fell upon and annihilated a Turkish 
squadron lying in the Turkish harbour 
of Sinope. Popular indignation in 
England and France rose high, and 
Aberdeen was forced ts consent to the 
occupation of the Black Sea by the 
joint fleets. It can hardly be doubted 
that the extremely pacific language 
adopted by the Prime Minister had 
encouraged the Tsar in the conviction 
that Great Britain might be relied upon 
not to declare war. 

In the meantime the Turks had 
crossed the Danube and had achieved 
some definite successes. In February 
(1854) France and Britain, who had 
reason to expect support from Austria 
but did not wait for her joint action, 
sent to Russia a demand for the evacu- 
ation of the principalities ; and the 
rejection of the demand was followed 

at the end of March by the declaration of war. The position seemed to 
point clearly to an approaching campaign on the Danube. In that ex- 
pectation the forces of the allies were conveyed to Varna. The situation, 
however, was changed by the intervention of Austria, which, although 
she did not actually declare war, induced Russia to withdraw from the 
principalities. This was enough for Austria, but not for Britain and 
France. It was universally felt that the retirement of the Powers would 
still leave Russia free to choose her own opportunity for striking at Turkey. 
It was imperative to strike a blow which would enable the Powers to 
dictate terms giving the necessary security. The strength of the Russians 
in the Black Sea depended on their position at Sevastopol in the Crimea, 
and a campaign in the Crimea was resolved upon. 

Unfortunately it was not anticipated that there would be any necessity 




The Crimean Peninsula. 



860 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

for a winter campaign. Had it been possible to carry out the plan at the 
moment when it was first mooted by Lord Palmerston, in June, it is 
probable that Sevastopol would have fallen at once ; but transport diffi- 
culties and cholera intervened, and it was not till the second week of 
September that the French and British forces landed in the Crimea, at a 
point some thirty miles to the north of Sevastopol, in the Bay of Eupatoria. 
The British, commanded by Lord Raglan, numbered something less than 
twenty-five thousand men, the French force, under Marshal St. Arnaud, 
being slightly larger. The advance of the force was blocked by the 
Russians on the river Alma. After a hard fight, of which the British bore 
the brunt, the Russians were driven back in rout, but owing to the 
opposition of the French Marshal the pursuit was not pressed. When 
the army did advance Lord Raglan again yielded to St. Arnaud, and 




The British forces marching to the attack at the Battle of the Alma, September 20, 1854. 
[After a sketch made from a battleship stationed in the river during the battle.] 

instead of making an immediate attack on the north side of Sevastopol, 
the allies marched round and took up their position at Balaclava. 

For the third time the British yielded to the French, who objected to 
an immediate attack, and the allies prepared themselves to lay siege to 
Sevastopol on the southern side, the British lying on the east of the French, 
and therefore being in the more dangerous position. For the Russian 
general, Menschikoff, had withdrawn into the interior to secure his com- 
munications, not into the fortress, and any attack from him would fall 
upon the British. His communications with Sevastopol were also open, 
the allied force not being sufficiently large to effect a complete investment. 
The delay in attack enabled the Russian, or rather German, engineer, 
Todleben, to strengthen the defences, a work accomplished with extra- 
ordinary skill and rapidity ; while the harbour had been protected from 
the operations of the allied fleet by sinking Russian ships in the entrance. 
The actual garrison consisted mainly of the sailors from the Russian fleet. 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 



861 



The general result was that a great bombardment was opened on 
October 17th and was maintained for a week, but only to prove that 
Sevastopol would not fall without a prolonged siege. On the 25th 
the Russians attempted to relieve the fortress by seizing the port of 
Balaclava, on which the British were dependent for their supplies. The 
attempt was foiled mainly by the magnificent charge of the Heavy Brigade, 
which shattered and rolled back an advancing column of Russians of five 
times their own numbers. But the splendid action of the Heavy Brigade, 
crowned as it was by triumphant success, has been eclipsed in the minds 
of men by the famous charge of the Light Brigade, as futile and purpose- 
less as it was heroic. Under a misappre- 
hension of orders received from the general, 
Lord Lucan, in command of the cavalry, 
entirely against his own judgment, ordered 
the Light Brigade of six hundred men to 
charge through a deadly storm of fire upon 
a distant Russian battery. The order was 
obeyed. The six hundred charged to the 
guns, carried them, and then the survivors 
rode back again — " all that was left of them." 

Ten days later Menschikoff again attacked 
the British position at Inkermann. The 
attack was made in the early morning in a 
thick mist. As a consequence of the con- 
ditions the battle resolved itself into one in 
which groups of soldiers fought independently 
in detached parties not knowing what was 
going on in other parts of the field. It was 
a soldiers' battle, fought and won by the sheer obstinate valour of the men, 
unaided by tactical skill or science on the part of the officers, for which 
there was literally no opportunity. By downright valour and discipline the 
British won and drove off the hosts of the Russians. 

After Inkermann the army settled down to the long horrors of the 
winter siege which have become a proverb. The campaign had been 
entered upon with no expectation that it would be prolonged through 
the winter, and with* no preparations for that contingency. The home 
organisation failed disastrously in providing supplies ; even those which 
reached Balaclava in the first instance were destroyed in a gale before they 
could be disembarked. Those which arrived later could only with extreme 
difficulty be carried to the front. The criminality of contractors from 
whom the supplies were obtained made matters infinitely worse. The 
storm of public indignation which was aroused compelled Aberdeen to 
resign, and the nation demanded that Palmerston should be called to the 
position of Prime Minister. Fresh vigour was imparted to the administra- 
tion ; the system was reorganised, and the conditions improved rapidly 




Lord Raglan. 

[From a drawing by Edward Armitage in 1854.] 



862 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

with the advance of the spring. But perhaps the most notable feature in 
the improvements was due to the initiative of Miss Florence Nightingale 
and her heroic staff of nurses, to which has been due the whole new 
modern conception of the treatment of the sick and wounded in war. 

A conference of the Powers was summoned in March ; it came to 
nothing; but, when Sevastopol fell in September, peace negotiations were 
renewed, and in March 1856 the Powers signed the Treaty of Paris. Even 
then Britain would hardly have obtained by the treaty the security against 
Russian aggression for the sake of which she had entered upon the war, but 
for the resolute attitude of Palmerston and Clarendon, who was still 
Foreign Secretary. The Emperor of the French had won the military 
prestige which was more important to him than the curbing of Russia, 
and he was anxious for peace. The Austrian Emperor had owed a good 




The Port and town of Sevastopol, showing the Forts, in 1 854. 
[From a drawing made in 1854.] 

deal to Russia in the past, and Russia was prepared to concede as much as 
the direct Austrian interests demanded. It was only by making it clear 
that Britain was prepared to carry on the war single-handed if necessary, 
that Clarendon obtained a satisfactory treaty. The Black Sea was 
neutralised ; it was to be open to commerce, but the Russians were to be 
allowed to have only six ships of war upon it. All disputes between the 
Porte and any of the Powers which signed the treaty were to be referred 
to the joint decision of the signatory Powers. All conquests were to be 
restored, and the Sultan was again pledged to carry out the engagements 
which he had made as to the treatment of his Christian subjects. The 
trans-Danube principalities were to be in effect autonomous but under 
Turkish suzerainty. The British conceded sundry points which they had 
hitherto upheld with regard to maritime law in time of war ; the goods of 
neutrals and goods carried under a neutral flag, with the exception of 
actual contraband of war, were to be exempt from capture. But 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 863 

blockades, to be technically recognised, must be actually effective, and 
privateering was to be abolished. 

Apart from the retirement of the Peelites, including Gladstone, when 
Palmerston's administration was formed, the only political event of domestic 
importance at this time was an unsuccessful attempt to revive the creation 
of Life Peerages. Had the attempt been successful, it would have become 
possible to modify very considerably the character of the House of Lords 
by introducing an increasing non-hereditary element. Baron Parke was to 
be raised to the peerage as Lord Wensleydale, but the form of the patent 
conveyed the peerage for his own life only. The Lords protested ; the 
question was referred to a Committee of Privilege ; and it was found that 
no such form had been used for four hundred years. The Government 
gave way and the ordinary form was adopted. 

Though the war in Europe was brought to an end, two other minor 
wars were soon engaging a degree of public attention. The Shah of Persia, 
misled, like other orientals, as to the character of the Crimean War, and 
by Russian successes which attended it in Asia Minor, imagined that the 
British power was collapsing and that the Russian star was in the ascendant. 
Therefore once more he attacked Afghanistan and captured Herat. Lord 
Auckland's blunder, however, was not repeated ; the British came to the 
aid of Dost Mohammed, and an expedition to the Persian Gulf under the 
command of Sir James Outram very soon brought the Shah to reason. 
He retired from Afghanistan, promised not to interfere with i| again, and 
accepted Britain as arbitrator in any dispute which might arise between 
himself and the Russians. The British action also had the valuable effect 
of securing the confidence and loyalty of the Amir at Kabul. But the 
necessity for the Persian expedition was unfortunate, because it withdrew 
white troops from India at the moment when a grave and unsuspected 
crisis was impending. 

Almost at the same moment the country became involved in compli- 
cations with China. A collision some years before, arising out of the 
opium traffic, had resulted in a small war terminated in 1842 by the Treaty 
of Nankin, under which Hong-Kong had been ceded to the British. In 
1856, a Chinese vessel called the Arrow, commanded by an Englishman 
and flying the British flag, was seized by the Chinese authority at Canton, 
and her crew were carried off on a charge of piracy. On the doubtful 
assumption that the Arrow was a British vessel, the Chinese were bound by 
treaty to hand over the crews to the British authority at Hong-Kong for 
the investigation of the case. The Chinese refused to do so. Sir John 
Bowring at Hong-Kong summoned the British squadron to coerce the 
Chinese. Palmerston supported his action in Parliament, and the hostili- 
ties developed into open war. The high-handed action of the Government 
was seized upon both by the formal Opposition and by the advanced 
Liberals, who disliked Palmerston's aggressiveness, as providing a ground 
for attacking the ministry. Palmerston, however, appealed to the country, 



864 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

finding his actual position in parliament untenable, and the country returned 
him to power with a decisive majority. But the operations against 
China were delayed by the diversion of the expedition to the support of 
the British Government in India, which in the early summer of 1857 was 
plunged into the great catastrophe of the Sepoy Mutiny. 



II 
DALHOUSIE AND THE SEPOY REVOLT 

Great men of the highest rank have been numbered among the British 
Governors-General of India ; brilliant men who might have achieved 
greatness but failed to do so ; masterful men whose successes were achieved 
by methods which were sometimes questionable ; strong men who went 
their way wisely and quietly, whose names the British public has almost 
forgotten. But in the whole series from Warren Hastings himself to the 
distinguished statesmen who are still living among us to-day there is no 
figure more remarkable than that of the man who left India at the beginning 
of 1856 after eight years of strenuous rule. 

Two only among the great Governors-General, Wellesley and Dalhousie, 
have been guided by the conviction that it was desirable to seize every 
opportunity to bring native states under direct British dominion. All 
have recognised the necessity for asserting British influence and British 
control, but all the rest have done so with a distinct preference for main- 
taining the government of the native dynasty if it were practicable to do so. 
Dalhousie and Wellesley alone preferred on principle to substitute direct 
British dominion wherever it was possible to do so without positive in- 
justice. The most extensive annexations were indeed those for which 
Lord Hastings was responsible ; but in his case there had been no alterna- 
tive ; they were necessitated by the Maratha War. Wellesley had proceeded 
mainly by the method of subsidiary alliances, and in the case of Arcot 
by the ejection of a dynasty which had proved itself hopelessly unfit to 
govern. 

Dalhousie now added to the British dominion by the conquest and 
annexation of the Punjab as already narrated, and, somewhat against his 
will, by the conquest and annexation of a great part of Burmah. In both 
cases the war was not of his making, and the annexation was bound to 
follow ; but the case was very different in sundry other cases, where it may 
be laid down with certainty that Dalhousie's predecessors would not have 
annexed at all. Most of them were examples of " escheat " ; that is to say, 
the territories passed to the paramount power, the suzerain, by lapse or 
failure of heirs, a process familiar alike to Western and to Indian law. 
The most prominent instance was that of Nagpur, where Lord Hastings in 
similar circumstances had not annexed but had preserved the native 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 865 

government by setting up a Bhonsla who was of the kindred of the lapsed 
family, though he had no legal title to the succession. But Dalhousie, 




when the Nagpur Rajah died without an heir, refused, acting perfectly 
within his legal rights, to seek for a native successor, and annexed the 
Nagpur territory. 

3 1 



866 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

But he went further than this In other cases. It had been customary 
for a Rajah, failing heirs of his body, to adopt a successor in accordance 
with Hindu law. The paramount power, whether the Moguls or the 
British, had never admitted an obligation to recognise adoption as con- 
veying a title to the throne, but had habitually recognised it as a matter 
of grace. At Satara, Jhansi, and elsewhere Dalhousie refused to sanction 
adoption, and annexation by lapse was the necessary result. No one could 
dispute either the legality of his action or the immensely superior character 
of the administration by the British ; but intense uneasiness was created 
among all the native dynasties who saw that a continuation of the process 
would gradually absorb the whole of India under direct British dominion. 
The final annexation was that of Oudh, but for a different reason — the 
persistent maladministration by the reigning Mohammedan dynasty in spite 
of repeated warnings. Here, however, the responsibility did not rest with 
Dalhousie, who had recommended a different course ; and he had himself 
left India when the annexation was actually carried out in accordance with 
instructions from England. 

Dalhousie during his term of office greatly extended the system of 
education, carried out immense public works, introduced the telegraph, 
initiated railway construction, developed the material prosperity of the 
country, and completely mastered the disorderly elements. The Punjab 
in particular, first under Henry Lawrence and then under his brother John, 
was converted into an exceedingly prosperous and, as was presently proved, 
loyal province. But Dalhousie's system had produced an intense unrest 
beneath the surface ; it had involved a large increase in the native army, 
while, in spite of his own protests, this had been accompanied by a reduction 
in the number of the white troops. His masterfulness and his personal 
hold upon every branch of the administration had taught many of the 
higher officials to look to headquarters for direction instead of being 
prepared to take a vigorous initiative themselves ; and thus Dalhousie's 
powerful rule even by its own efficiency and progressiveness prepared the 
way for the cataclysm which followed. 

The mutiny is apt to be regarded outside of India as a somewhat 
unintelligible phenomenon, the outcome in part of the arrogant attitude of 
the British towards the natives and in part of a panic because of what was 
called the Cartridge Incident. As a matter of fact the phenomenon is 
perfectly intelligible if we attempt to realise the whole situation. In the 
first place the government was lulled into a sense of perfect security by 
the completeness of its power demonstrated during the regime of Lord 
Dalhousie, and also by the consciousness of the material advantages that 
the peoples were reaping or would reap from the excellence of its adminis- 
tration. That sense of security provided the very best opportunity for 
those who wished to organise a revolt. There were two groups of natives 
who had a very strong inducement in their own history to overthrow the 
British power, the Mohammedans who had been the lords of India, and the 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ' ERA 867 

Marathas who believed that they would have been the lords of India but 
for the British. The available instrument of revolution was there in the 
sepoy army, if it could be persuaded thai its own interests lay in the over- 
throw of British dominion. The government in its unconsciousness blindly 
played into the hands of agitators by giving them the opportunity of 
appealing to the superstitious or religious terrors of the soldiery ; and it 
had alienated the Hindu princes, who would normally prefer a British to a 
Mohammedan or a Maratha ascendency, by its new attitude on the adoption 
question. As for the population at large it had been accustomed for 
centuries to treat wars and revolutions like earthquakes and famines as 
inflictions to which it had to submit passively without dreaming of taking a 
direct part. The elements which were not thus fatalistically peaceful were 
precisely those which very much preferred anarchy to any orderly govern- 
ment, and especially such a government as that of the British. Finally, all 
over Hindustan from the borders of Bengal proper to the river Sutlej there 
w T ere swarms of native" regiments, while the white troops could be reckoned 
in hundreds. The salvation of the British lay in the fact that there was 
not and could not be any national organisation of India for their overthrow 
because there was not and never had been an Indian nation. The over- 
throw of the British could only to follovved by an internecine struggle for 
supremacy among the different divisions and cross divisions into which 
India was broken up by races, religions, and dynasties. The Mohammedans 
were not going to fight for Hindu liberties or a Maratha supremacy. The 
Marathas were not going to fight for a Mogul supremacy. The Rajput 
princes were not going to fight either for Marathas or for Mussulmans. 
There could be no common aim except a merely destructive one. And so 
when the insurrection came it was the work mainly of the Mogul faction, 
and was joined only by such Hindu princes or chiefs as had a personal 
grudge against the British Government. The Nizam remained loyal, though 
he found it hard to keep his troops in restraint ; Sindhia remained loyal, 
though it was only for a time that he succeeded in keeping his soldiers in 
check. The Rajputs and the Punjab remained loyal, and in the end the 
Sikhs, who were traditional enemies of the Moguls and detested the Hin- 
dustanis, rendered splendid service to the British. Even in Oudh the 
great landowners or talukdars stood resolutely aloof until after the back 
of the revolt had been broken. 

The organisers then of the revolt, so far as it was organised at all, were 
a Mussulman faction on the one hand, who intended to reinstate the Mogul 
empire over India, and on the other Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the 
last Peishwa who had been deposed in 18 19. The Nana looked upon 
himself as the hereditary head of the Marathas, and he cherished an intense 
personal grudge against the British Government because, while it left him 
great estates, it had not continued to him the immense pension which it 
had allowed his adoptive father for life. The Nana secretly fomented 
sedition, while the Mussulman conspirators directed their especial attention 



868 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

to the army, utilising for that purpose the superstitions of the Hindu 
soldiery as well as the sympathies of the Mohammedans. An ancient 
prophecy was circulated which pronounced that the British Raj would end 
with its hundredth year, 1857. Hindus and Mohammedans alike could 
never rid themselves of a belief that the British intended by force or by 
trickery to make them all Christians, for which Mohammedan rulers had 
given ample precedents in the forcible conversion of Hindus to Moham- 
medanism. The Hindus had recently been disturbed by being ordered to 

serve in Burmah ; for the Hindu who crosses 
the seas thereby loses his caste, a matter at 
least as serious to him as excommunication 
to a Roman Catholic. This alarm was in- 
creased by a proclamation issued by Lord 
Canning, soon after his arrival as Governor- 
General in 1856, announcing that in future 
all regiments would be liable to service 
across the sea. Then came the Cartridge 
Incident. A new rifle was adopted in which 
greased cartridges were used, the tips of 
which the sepoy had fo bite. It was reported 
that the grease was made from the fat of 
cattle and pigs. To the Mussulman the pig 
is an unclean animal and to the Hindu the 
cow is a sacred one. The panic was not 
allayed even by the withdrawal of the first 
batch of cartridges and the public declara- 
tion that the grease employed would be free 
from the obnoxious ingredients. 

The whole sepoy army throughout Hindu- 
stan was in a ferment. Regiments began here 
and there to mutiny; then on May 10, 1857, 
the whole of the regiments at Mirat, a great military station in the north-west 
provinces, mutinied, killed every European they could lay hands on, marched 
upon Delhi, and proclaimed the restoration of the Mogul. In the next few 
weeks nearly every sepoy regiment between Delhi and Patna had thrown 
off its allegiance though Allahabad was secured, and almost all the British 
with the few sepoys who remained loyal were shut up in the Lucknow 
Residency, or at Cawnpore or Agra, or were assembled on the Ridge out- 
side Delhi besieging a mutineer force in that city which outnumbered the 
besiegers by at least five to one. 

Before the end of June Cawnpore had fallen. There a mere handful 
of combatants and a large number of non-combatants, women and children, 
were besieged by Nana Sahib. For three weeks the defence was maintained 
till the place had become untenable. Then the defenders took the only 
course open to them and surrendered on terms. They were to be sent 




Nana Sahib. 
[From a sketch made in 1857.] 



THE PALxMERSTONIAN ERA 869 

down the river in safety to Allahabad. They were crowded into boats and 
pushed off into the stream. Then the native boatmen slipped overboard, 
and the Nana's men from the shore began to pour volleys into the helpless 
fugitives. The treacherous attack was followed up by a general massacre 
of the men, while the women and children were carried back to captivity 
in Cawnpore. 

From the end of June to the second half of September the interest of 
the great struggle concentrated at three points, the siege of Delhi by the 
small force on the Ridge, the de- 
fence of the Lucknow Residenc}^ 
and the efforts of Sir Henry Have- 
lock to effect the relief of Lucknow. 
The mutineers were assembled in 
force at Delhi itself, in the city of 
Lucknow, and at Cawnpore, block- 
ing the advance of -the relieving 
force. Until the latter part of 
August the six thousand men on 
the Ridge before Delhi were kept 
mainly on the defensive. By that 
time John Lawrence had been able 
to despatch a flying column from 
the Punjab under General Nicholson 
to reinforce the besieging army, 
followed at the beginning of Sep- 
tember by a siege train, without 
which it would have been impos- 
sible to attempt the actual capture 
of the mutineer stronghold. By 
the daring and skill of the engineer 
operations, actively conducted by 
Alexander Taylor, breaching bat- 
teries were at last brought to bear on September nth ; on the 14th the 
Kashmir gate was blown up and the ramparts of Delhi were stormed ; day 
by day the British troops fought their way into the city, and on the 21st 
they were in full possession, with the Mogul himself in their hands, though 
a large portion of the mutineer force was on its retreat to Lucknow. 

Meanwhile at Lucknow itself the Residency held out stubbornly. The 
character of the defence may be gathered from the fact that no fewer than 
twenty-five mines were detected and exploded by the vigilance of the garrison 
engineers in nine weeks. The force was never in actual danger of starva- 
tion, but the absolutely ceaseless strain was terrific ; practically no news 
could be obtained from outside ; a serious loss had been suffered by the 
death of Sir Henry Lawrence in the first week of the siege, and even the 
loyal sepoys, splendidly as they fought, were declaring that they must 




Sir John Lawrence. 



870 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

march out on October 1st unless relief had arrived, when Havelock and 
Outram broke their way in on September 25th and the pressing danger 
was averted. 

Havelock had begun his march from Allahabad on July 7th with two 
thousand men all told, a quarter of whom were sepoys. The first object 
was to rescue the captives at Cawnpore, the next to advance through Oudh 

to Lucknow. On the tenth 
day he reached Cawnpore. 
On one day he had fought 
two successive actions, and 
on this tenth day three. 
He was too late. When 
Nana Sahib found that no- 
thing could stop Havelock, 
he deliberately butchered 
the women and children 
in cold blood and flung 
the bodies of his victims 
into a well. Never in our 
history had such a cry for 
vengeance arisen as when 
the story of that hideous 
crime was told. 

Havelock crossed the 
Ganges and drove the 
rebels before him in one 
fight after another ; but 
cholera had attacked his 
force, and now came news 
that down the river Dina- 
pur had mutinied and on 
the west the Gwalior army 
was on the march. With- 
out some reinforcement it was impossible to advance, and he had to fall 
back on Cawnpore itself. It was an unfortunate necessity, for it made 
the people of Oudh imagine that the relief was abandoned and the triumph 
of the mutiny was assured, so that the talukdars no longer ventured to 
restrain their dependents from joining the insurgents. 

Nevertheless reinforcements under Outram did arrive. On the day 
after the ramparts of Delhi were stormed, Havelock and Outram joined 
hands at Cawnpore, their whole force numbering three thousand men. 
Outram, the senior officer, would not deprive his heroic comrade of the 
glory of achieving the relief, but chose instead to serve as a volunteer under 
him. Ten days later they drove their way through the mutineer hosts, and 
the Lucknow Residency was secured. 




The Memorial Well at Cawnpore. 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 871 

The tide had been stemmed ; now it turned. Sir Colin Campbell had 
already arrived in India to take the chief command. On November 17th 
he effected the actual relief of the Residency, the non-combatants were 
withdrawn, the position so long and so stubbornly defended was abandoned, 
and a strong garrison was placed instead under Outram in the neighbour- 
ing fort called the Alam Bagh. Havelock's work was already done; that 
typical Puritan hero passed 
away a few days after Sir 
Colin's arrival. 

There was still plenty 
for the commander-in-chief 
to do. The city of Lucknow 
was still held by an im- 
mense force of mutineers. 
On the south-west the 
Gwalior army, under the 
one really capable mutineer 
leader, Tantia Topi, had 
joined Nana Sahib at Cawn- 
pore. Not three weeks after 
the relief of the Residency, 
on December 6th, Campbell 
routed and split the enemy's 
force, driving the Nana over 
the Ganges in one direction 
and Tantia Topi over the 
Jumna in another. On 
March 17th Lucknow itself 
was captured after hard «SM| 
fighting. Meanwhile Sir ^ 
Hugh Rose had been con- 
ducting a brilliant campaign 
in Central India, and at the 
beginning of April he put 
Tantia Topi finally to rout and captured Jhansi, the last real stronghold 
of resistance, though many months still passed before the last embers 
of the great revolt were stamped out. Only in the final stage the Oudh 
talukdars had taken alarm at a proclamation issued by the Governor- 
General and had thrown themselves actively into the revolt when it was 
already hopeless. 

No episode in our history has in it so much of tragedy, none more 
of heroism than the story of the Indian Mutiny, when the British fought 
with their backs to the wall shoulder to shoulder with loyal natives ; when 
numbers of women showed a supreme fortitude in the day of supreme 
horror. But not the least heroic among many heroic figures was that 




Sir Henry Havelock. 
[After the portrait by Frederick Goodall, R.A.] 



872 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

of Lord Canning, the Governor-General, who, in the midst of such a storm 
of wrath as never before or since has moved the British people, dared 
to face bitter obloquy, fierce denunciation, and angry ridicule, while he 
held fast to the principles of justice and refused to seek an undiscriminat- 
ing revenge. The name of " Clemency " Canning, flung at him in scorn, 
will cling to him through the ages as a high title of honour. 

The mutiny brought the end of the old order. It convinced the 
government at home that the time had definitely come for ending the old 
East India Company and transferring the government of India to the 
Crown. It was not British dominion but the dominion of the East India 
Company which lasted for a hundred years. The India Act of 1858 
established the system under which the government of India is vested 
in the Viceroy and Council, responsible to the Secretary of State for India, 
who is a member of the ministry responsible to Parliament. The first 
Viceroy under the new regime was the last Governor-General under the 
old, Clemency Canning. 



nr 

PALMERSTON 

While the Indian Mutiny was still in progress the Chinese war was 
brought apparently to a conclusion. The French were associated in 
it with the British because they had taken the opportunity to press demands 
of their own, and the Chinese governor, who defied the British, had issued 
a proclamation setting a price upon the heads of Frenchmen as well 
as Englishmen. In January 1858 Canton was captured. The Chinese 
government made no reply to peace proposals, so the Europeans attacked 
the Piho River, destroyed the forts which were intended to secure it, and 
advanced to Tien-tsin. There a treaty was concluded in June, by which the 
Chinese were forced to open some additional ports and the rights and 
powers of jurisdiction of the foreigners were defined. 

The announcement of the peace did not fall to the Palmerston Govern- 
ment, which had come to a sudden and unexpected end in February. An 
attempt was made upon the life of the French Emperor by throwing bombs 
under his carriage. The principal conspirator was a man named Orsini, 
who had been a refugee in England while the plan was concocted. In 
France there was great excitement and a clamour for severe repressive 
measures in England. Language of a highly aggressive and bombastic 
character was used, which created corresponding irritation among the 
British. Palmerston and Clarendon were the last men to yield on points 
where British honour and British interests were concerned ; but Palmerston 
desired to remain on good terms with the Emperor, and there was obvious 
reason at the bottom of the clamour in France when the right of asylum 






THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 873 

in England for political refugees was utilised for the concoction of assassina- 
tion plots. Lord Palmerston introduced what is known as the Conspiracy 
to Murder Bill. Conspiracy to murder was a capital offence in Ireland, 
but only a misdemeanour in England. The bill proposed to make it 
both in England and Ireland a felony punishable by transportation or 
imprisonment with hard labour, without respect to the particular country 
in which it was intended 
that the murder should be 
committed. But the country 
took it as a base submission 
to the threats of France, 
while advanced Liberals re- 
garded it as a surrender of 
the right of asylum. The 
Government was defeated, 
and Palmerston resigned. 
For the second time Lord 
Derby took office, with Dis- 
raeli as the leader of the 
Conservative party in the 
House of Commons. 

The fall of the Palmerston 
ministry followed upon the 
introduction of a bill for 
transferring the government 
of India to the Crown. A 
new bill was now introduced, 
remarkably ingenious, but 
obviously open to the most 
hostile criticism ; yet the 
Liberals, seriously shaken by 
the dissensions which had 
brought about the fall of the 
late administration, were by 
no means anxious to turn the new Government out, though they could hardly 
have avoided voting against the bill. Both parties, then, accepted Russell's 
proposal that the bill should be withdrawn, the sense of the House taken 
upon a series of resolutions, and a bill then introduced embodying the 
views which had found favour, the scheme not being treated as a party 
question at all. The plan was successfully followed ; the India Act was 
passed, and the government of the great dependency was transferred to the 
Crown. 

For some years past there had been a growing inclination in the country 
to recognise the need of further parliamentary reform. Palmerston, how- 
ever, with a considerable section of the Liberals, was by no means willing 




Queen Victoria in 1857. 

[From a pastel painting by Alexander Blaikley.] 



874 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

to proceed further hi the direction of democracy, and the question had 
more than once been shelved. But now the Conservatives were uneasily 
dominated by the personality of their brilliant leader in the House of 
Commons, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was a man of ideas, to an extent 
exceedingly rare among British politicians. Those ideas were as remote 
as possible from the unimaginative conservatism, which views with alarm 
any possible change from that to which it has been accustomed, and 
remains blind to altering conditions, impervious to new facts. But he 
had thrown in his lot with the Conservative party ; it was the instrument 

with which he had to work, and he had to 
educate it into acceptance of his leadership 
along paths which it would never have dreamt 
of treading on its own account. Disraeli was 
not afraid of democracy, because he believed in 
his own power of leadership and in popular 
support as the strongest basis on which govern- 
ment can rest. He saw now his opportunity 
for transforming the Conservatives into the 
popular party, and came forward as the advocate 
of parliamentary reform, which the Liberals had 
successfully relegated to the background. 

But Disraeli had not yet realised that he 
was too ingenious both for the old Tories and 
for the country at large. The Government bill 
was full of subtle devices which, in the eyes 
of a suspicious Opposition, were intended only 
to bring into the enlarged franchise classes 
whose interest it would be to vote for the 
Conservatives, while shutting out those who 
were likely to vote Liberal ; whereas to cautious 
Conservatives it seemed fraught with democratic perils. The Reform Bill 
was thrown out, Lord Derby appealed to the country, and when the new 
Parliament met a vote of " no confidence " in the Government was im- 
mediately carried. Lord Derby resigned, Russell consented to serve under 
Palmerston with the charge of the Foreign Office, and all administration 
was formed which remained in power till Palmerston's death. 

It was inevitable in the circumstances that the new Government should 
bring in a reform bill of its own. But as a matter of fact the country, 
the House, and the Cabinet were all apathetic. It was not difficult to find 
excuses for postponement, and the postponement was in effect a withdrawal. 
The question was once more shelved, and it was generally understood that 
it would not again be officially brought forward under Palmerston. The 
interest of domestic affairs during Palmerston's premiership centres almost 
entirely in the series of budgets by which Gladstone, as Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, carried to completion the system of Free Trade which logically 




^l^kC^_ 



Benjamin Disraeli. 

[From an early portrait in the " Maclise 
Portrait Gallery." 



THE PALMERSTONXAN ERA 875 

followed upon the financial policy of Sir Robert Peel. Incidentally one 
of Gladstone's finance bills foreshadowed the great collision between the two 
Houses of Parliament which was precipitated by another finance bill almost 
fifty years afterwards. 

No effective movement was made in this direction in the 1859 budget, 
because the European situation was threatening, an increased expenditure 
was anticipated, and, instead of reducing taxation, Gladstone increased the 
income tax, a course which was held preferable to that of raising a loan. 
It was in effect becoming a recognised principle that the year's expenditure 
should be met out of the year's revenue whenever the country was not 
actually at war. But before the next budget was introduced in i860 a 
commercial treaty was entered upon with France which was negotiated by 
Richard Cobden, the great apostle of Free Trade. Napoleon III. him- 
self was a believer in the economic doctrines which now held the field 
in England ; but neither in France nor speaking generally in the rest of 
Europe were those doctrines accepted. The treaty, therefore, went just 
as far as the emperor could venture. Cobden and the free-traders them- 
selves believed in the commercial advantage of abolishing all tariffs, whether 
foreign countries adopted the same system or no ; although they anticipated 
that foreign countries would adopt the system and that British commerce 
would gain all the more, an anticipation which has not been fulfilled. But 
in form the commercial treaty was one of reciprocity ; that is, France agreed 
to abolish prohibitions and to reduce the duties on practically all British 
goods, while no preference was to be given to goods from any other country. 
On the other hand, Britain removed the tariff on very nearly all imported 
goods. 

This principle was embodied in the budget of i860. Of the four 
hundred and nineteen articles still on the schedule all but forty-eight 
were struck off. Between 1845 and 1859 more than seven hundred had 
been removed. As regards the forty-eight articles now remaining, none 
of the duties were either preferential or protective ; that is to say, the 
whole of the proceeds went directly to the revenue, all producers competing 
on equal terms so far as British taxation was concerned. In spite of the 
greatly diminished cost of collection, it was estimated that the immediate 
loss to revenue would exceed two millions, although the Chancellor of the 
Exchequer looked forward to increased receipts in the future from articles 
on which the duty was reduced. For the time, therefore, the full amount 
of the duties on tea and sugar was retained and the income tax was 
placed at tenpence. 

At this date a very substantial item in the national revenue was derived 
from the tax upon paper, which it was now proposed to abolish. This was a 
demand which the Radicals had been urging, because the high price of paper 
stood in the way of the publication of cheap literature. From the high 
Conservative point of view the publication of cheap literature appeared to 
be not desirable but dangerous, since it would enable the lucubrations of 



876 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

agitators to be scattered broadcast. But, apart from this, it appeared 
at least questionable whether cheaper literature was needed more urgently 
than cheaper tea and sugar. Palmerston himself and many other Liberals 
viewed the proposal with anything but enthusiasm. The bill for the 
abolition of the paper duties was not incorporated with the rest of the 
financial proposals for the year in one bill, but stood by itself. It was 
passed in the House of Commons by a majority of fifty on the second 
reading, but on the third reading the majority dwindled to nine. The 
bill went up to the House of Lords. Since the days of the Stuarts the 
Lords had never interfered with a finance bill ; but Lord Lyndhurst, a 
former Conservative Lord Chancellor, now led the opposition to the 
paper bill, laying it down as the law of the constitution that, while the 
Lords might not amend a finance bill, they had the right of rejecting it 
in its entirety, and were therefore free to reject this particular bill if they 
thought fit. The Opposition were victorious, and the Lords threw out the 
bill by a large majority. 

It is curious to find that the Prime Minister expressed to the Queen his 
own personal conviction beforehand that if the Lords rejected the bill they 
would deserve well of the country, although the Cabinet, of which he was 
the head, was responsible for it. Extreme indignation, however, was 
aroused by the action of the Lords, and a violent collision was only averted 
when Palmerston introduced in the House of Commons a series of resolu- 
tions, claiming that the Commons alone had the right of controlling 
supplies, that the Lords' right of rejecting money bills was viewed with 
extreme jealousy by the Commons, and in effect that the remedy lay 
within the hands of the Commons themselves. Effect was given to the 
resolution by the Commons in the following year when the paper bill was 
incorporated with the rest of the budget. The Lords did not venture to 
throw out the budget in its entirety, and thus the abolition of the paper 
duties was carried. The right of the Lords to throw out a money bill was 
not again asserted until 1909. 

The expansion of trade and the increase of revenue derived from the 
lowered duties were so remarkable that, in spite of increased expenditure on 
national defence, the income tax, the tea duties, and the sugar duties were 
all materially reduced in 1863 and 1864. The rapid increase in the 
national wealth may be realised from the fact that between 1842 and 1861 
the assessments for income tax rose more than forty per cent. ; and the 
increase in the last eight years had been more than three times as great 
as that in the first ten. It was this enormous advance which completely 
established the almost universal conviction which prevailed throughout the 
rest of the century that Protectionism was absolutely dead and could never 
be revived. 

In the summer of 1865 Parliament was dissolved after a life of six 
years. Several successes in bye-elections had produced an impression 
that the Conservatives would come back to Parliament in greatly increased 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 877 

numbers. But the anticipation was not fulfilled. Palmerston was still the 
most popular minister in the country ; he commanded a great amount of 
support from Conservative sentiment, and his majority when the new 
Parliament met numbered more than sixty. But his reign was almost over. 
He was past eighty years of age ; he had recently been suffering from ill- 
health ; and in October he died, two days after his eighty-first birthday. 
The long truce was over ; the battle of democracy was immediately 
to be renewed. 



IY 

FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

The period of the Derby and Palmerston administrations was one of 
arrested activities at home. Foreign affairs were of a more exciting order. 




The capture of the North Fort at Piho, August i860. 
[From a sketch made on the spot.] 

We had affairs of our own to settle with the Chinese and Japanese, and 
also in the neighbourhood of the African Gold Coast, all of them in- 
volving military or naval operations. But also we had in Europe the 
exceedingly difficult task of endeavouring to assert ourselves effectively 
and at the same time avoiding war ; while events in the United States 
provided an equally difficult problem in another hemisphere. 

The Chinese trouble had not after all been settled by the Treaty of 
Tien-tsin since the Chinese government took no steps towards acting 
upon it. When the French and English envoys endeavoured, in ac- 
cordance with the terms of the treaty, to make their way to Pekin, they 
found the forts on the Piho rebuilt, the obstructions in the river restored, 
and their own passage refused. An attempt to carry the forts was repulsed ; 
and the usual necessity in dealing with orientals followed, of despatching 



878 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

an irresistible joint force of British and French. An ultimatum forwarded 
to Pekin was rejected. The Piho forts were taken after hard fighting. 
A conference was arranged to take place near Pekin, but the British 
officials who were sent forward to meet the Chinese commissioners were 
treacherously seized, some of them murdered, and others imprisoned. Lord 
Elgin, the British Plentipotentiary, demanded their release within three days ; 
as they were not released the army advanced, and seized and sacked the 
celebrated " summer palace." The Chinese, however, now found resistance 
useless, the prisoners were released, the allies occupied Pekin, and the 
Chinese submitted to the terms dictated. The previous treaty was ratified, 
a large indemnity paid, and the port of Tien-tsin was opened. 

Japan had hitherto cut herself off from the outside world even more 
completely than China. Until 1858 the Dutch were the only foreigners 
admitted to trade, and that only under very restricted conditions. At that 
time, however, Lord Elgin procured a treaty of commerce under which five 
ports were opened to British subjects, and a British embassy and consular 
agents were admitted. Four years later a Japanese embassy visited England. 
But the Japanese were not yet reconciled to the presence of foreigners. 
A member of the British embassy at Yokohama was murdered. Compensa- 
tion was demanded ; the compensation was promised but not paid, and 
the ports were closed. The British admiral in those seas seized some 
Japanese ships at Kagosima. The batteries on the shore opened fire on 
the squadron, and the squadron bombarded Kagosima. Thereupon the 
Japanese gave way, and the ports were again opened. 

The African affair referred to was an expedition from the Gold Coast 
against Ashanti, a somewhat futile demonstration against a savage native 
potentate who had been harrying friendly tribes. Such expeditions in 
peculiarly unhealthy regions are inevitably costly both in lives and in 
money, and, necessary though they are, always appear to be unproductive. 
The Ashanti expedition of 1864 was no exception to the general rule. 

Meanwhile Europe and America kept Lord John Russell at the Foreign 
Office very fully occupied, and it is possible that, but for the restraining in- 
fluence of the Queen and of the Prince Consort while he lived, the self-asser- 
tiveness of Russell and Palmerston might have involved the country in 
war. Grave European complications arose at the beginning of 1859 in Italy. 
The hopes of Italian nationalism centred in Victor Emmanuel, the King of 
Sardinia, and the first condition for Italian nationalism was the ending of 
the Austrian supremacy in North Italy. Victor Emmanuel's great minister, 
Cavour, secured the alliance of the French Emperor, and, after the failure 
of attempts to procure a European conference, a campaign was opened in 
Northern Italy in which the arms of the allies were successful. Napoleon, 
however, was playing for his own hand and stopped short of driving the 
Austrians out of the Peninsula. A temporary arrangement was arrived at, 
at the Treaty of Villafranca, by which Austria gave up Lombardy to Sardinia, 
Sardinia gave up Nice to France, and the former ducal dynasties were to 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 879 

be restored in the Italian duchies. But the duchies entirely declined to 
accept the arrangement and were solidly determined to annex themselves 
to Sardinia. The British Government had refused to intervene, while dis- 
playing the strongest sympathy with the Italian movement, and by its atti- 
tude it probably prevented Prussia from lending aid to Austria. Now 
its attitude was af J ain the decisive factor in the situation. British influence 




Lord Palmerston. 
[From a photograph. ] 

was exerted to the utmost to prevent any interference with the duchies in 
deciding their own fate. 

Austria accepted the situation, and those of the duchies which desired 
it — which meant every one of them — were permitted to annex themselves 
to the kingdom of Northern Italy. France however demanded the 
cession to herself of Savoy, which Savoy itself favoured. But the whole 
performance fomented British distrust of Napoleon, whose selfish designs 
had been made unmistakably clear. Ostensibly the two Powers had been 
working together ; but in fact the action of the British had thwarted the 



88o THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Emperor's real intentions. The sudden insurrection of Sicily led by the 
warrior-hero of Italian liberty, Garibaldi, the overthrow of the Bourbon 
dynasty of Naples, the skilfully audacious management of the situation by 
Cavour, and the voluntary annexation of the Southern state to Sardinia, 
made Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, with the exception of Rome, which 
was still held by the Pope under French protection, and of Venetia, which 
was still an Austrian province. In these developments the attitude of the 
British Government once more went far towards preventing active interven- 
tion by any other of the Powers. 

Very much less satisfactory, on the other hand, was the line taken by 
the Foreign Secretary, now raised to the peerage as Earl Russell, in con- 
nection with other European complications. The exceedingly intricate 
question of the sovereignty of Schleswig-Holstein, provinces attached to 
the kingdom of Denmark, became acute. Very few people indeed under- 
stood them, but to the British public it seemed that Prussia and Austria 
were combining to rob the little state of Denmark. It appeared that the 
Powers had guaranteed the integrity of Denmark, and popular sentiment 
was greatly excited. Russell remonstrated in a manner which was absurd, 
unless it was intended to back the remonstrance by force of arms, a course 
which the country would probably have endorsed. Already Russell had 
followed a similar line in addressing bellicose remonstrances to Russia 
on her treatment of an insurrection in Poland, when he had also induced 
Napoleon to remonstrate ; but he had then permitted both the Tsar and 
the French Emperor to see that the remonstrance would not be backed by 
force. Both the Western Powers were snubbed for their pains. Now, 
therefore, when Russell invited Napoleon to join in bringing diplomatic 
pressure to bear upon Austria and Prussia on behalf of Denmark, the 
Emperor declined to subject himself to the risk of another affront, and for 
the second time Britain was placed in an ignominous position in the eyes 
of Europe. British prestige suffered severely, not from British non- 
intervention, but because non-intervention had been preceded by threaten- 
ing language to which the minister who used it had never been prepared to 
give actual effect. 

Altogether different was the tone adopted by the British Government 
in relation to the great civil war which broke out in the United States of 
America early in 1861. There the attitude assumed was one of determined 
neutrality. The Southern States declared their right to separate themselves 
from the union and form a distinct confederation. Their ostensible reason 
for doing so was the claim of the central government of the whole body to 
exercise over the separate states a larger control than it was entitled to in 
the eyes of those states. The immediate cause was the growing determina- 
tion of the Northern States to abolish slavery. The Northern States 
denied the right of secession, claiming that the union was a "federal" one, 
in which case the attempt at separation is rebellion. The Southern States 
claimed that the Union was a u confederation " from which any member is 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 88 1 

entitled to separate itself. Hence the names " Confederates " applied to 
the Southern States and *' Federals " applied to the Northerners. The 
British Government declined to judge between them. Popular sentiment 
was violently divided, the passionate horror of slavery drawing one section 
of the public into fervent sympathy with the North, while the political 
advocacy of the right of self-government, which in fact had originally 
brought the United States into being, attracted the sympathies of another 
section to the Confederates. It must also be remarked that the sporting 
instincts of the British people were a powerful influence in favour of the 
South, since it was fighting against heavy odds. 

In America, however, British neutrality was viewed with extreme indig- 
nation. That the indignation was unjustified is most effectively proved by 
the fact that North and South felt it in almost equal degree, each being 
firmly convinced that right was on its side and that it was monstrous for 
the British not to act on that assumption. The Northerners felt that 
American nationality -was at stake, while to many of them it seemed im- 
possible to question that every right-thinking man was bound to give his whole 
sympathies to the abolition of slavery. The Southerners felt that they were 
fighting for a principle of political freedom which ought to appeal to every 
Briton ; they had been brought up to believe that slavery was a system 
emphatically sanctioned by Scripture, and half of them were much more 
alive to the condition of perfect contentment in which most of the slaves 
lived in the older states than to the ghastly abuses to which the whole 
system was liable. Therefore neither side forgave the British for not giving 
it whole-hearted and uncompromising support. 

The attitude of neutrality was at first advantageous to the South, whose 
arms were the more successful, for the British Government recognised the 
South as belligerents not rebels. Sympathy with the South in England 
was increased by the affair of the Trent, which very nearly involved Great 
Britain in the war. The Southerners, having set up a government of their 
own, despatched two commissioners to England and France. The com- 
missioners reached a neutral port and embarked on a British vessel, the 
Trent. The Trent was boarded by a Federal warship and the commis- 
sioners were carried off. A declaration of war was only averted when 
President Lincoln gave way to the demands of the British Government and 
released the commissioners. 

On the other hand, the Federals had serious cause of complaint. It 
was found that ships were built and fitted out in British docks and sailed 
from British ports with apparently harmless intent, their real destination, 
to be employed as cruisers by the Confederates, having been carefully con- 
cealed. It was claimed that the British Government did not display due 
vigilance in preventing such action, the most notorious instance being that of 
the Alabama. The British Government flatly repudiated the charge, but when 
the war had terminated in favour of the North, immense claims were brought 
forward for damages in respect of the depredations wrought by the cruisers. 

3 K 



882 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Another circumstance offered a very strong inducement to the British 
Government to render effective support to the South. The blockade of the 
Southern ports cut off the supplies of raw cotton on which the great 
Lancashire cotton industry was mainly dependent. The cotton famine 
deprived vast numbers of the Lancashire operatives of their means of liveli- 
hood. Immense credit was due to the Government and to the lavish gener- 
osity of the general public for the admirably organised efforts to relieve 
the terrible distress which resulted. But still higher praise is due to the 
operatives themselves for the splendid self-control they displayed. Had 




The " Alabama." 
[From a sketch by Charles W. Wyllie.] 

they clamoured as they might well have done for a refusal to recognise the 
blockade of the Southern ports as efficient, so that the cotton ships might 
have sailed, the Government could hardly have resisted. But the Lancashire 
men, in spite of their own sufferings, would not urge a course which would 
help in the perpetuation of slavery, and they bore their deprivations with a 
noble fortitude which exhibited the character of the British working-man 
in the very highest light. 

The resolute neutrality preserved from the beginning to the end of the 
war was bitterly resented for opposite reasons both by the North and by 
the South ; and in that fact is to be found the very strongest testimony to 
the essential justice of the British attitude and to the dignified self-control 
displayed by the Palmerston Government. 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 883 



V 
AFTER PALMERSTON 

The death of Palmerston involved little change in the ministry, but it 
restored Earl Russell to his old position as leader of the Liberal party, 
and it removed the great check upon the activities of the more advanced 
section of that party. Forty years before, Russell had already been con- 
spicuous as the importunate advocate of parliamentary reform ; and if he 
had declared himself satisfied with the great Reform Act, he had never- 
theless for several years past been an advocate of further franchise exten- 
sion. The question, however, was one on which it was almost certain the 
Liberals would split, since the Palmerstonian section was averse from any 
further democratic movement. But before the meeting of the Parliament 
which was destined to take up the question of reform, Irish affairs once 
more assumed a prominence which they had lost since Smith O'Brien's 
abortive insurrection in 1848. 

The destitution of the Irish peasantry intensified by the famine had 
brought about an immense emigration to America. Under the then 
existing conditions of industry and agriculture the country had become 
over-populated ; emigration relieved the strain, the excessive supply of labour 
in comparison with the actual demand was diminished, and the state of the 
country generally appeared to improve. But the emigrants departed to 
America with bitterness in their hearts, and the Irish in the United States 
became a new and disturbing factor in the Irish problem. In their eyes 
the root cause of the evils which had driven them into exile was the British 
dominion, and for many of them the release of their native country from 
what they regarded as a foreign yoke became a passion. In 1858 the 
Fenian Brotherhood was formed among them, a secret organisation having 
severance from England as its avowed aim and secret warfare as its avowed 
method, since open war was out of the question and force was regarded as 
the sole possible instrument for achieving the end in view. The strength 
of the movement lay in America, for it was essentially political, neither 
agrarian nor religious, appealing very little to the Irish peasant and not 
at all to the Irish priest. And the organisation gathered a new strength 
from the American Civil War. Irishmen fought in the ranks on both sides, 
and learnt something of discipline and of military organisation ; and the 
leaders were not without hope that the hostility to the British which had 
been aroused in America might be utilised to further their schemes. 

Secret societies, however, rarely remain for long exempt from the 
activities of informers. Acting upon information, the Government in 
Ireland suddenly arrested a number of the Fenian ringleaders and seized 
their papers. They were condemned to long terms of imprisonment, and 



884 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the widespread character of the conspiracy was revealed. The Habeas 
Corpus Act was suspended, numerous other arrests were made, there was 
a hasty exodus of Fenians, and the United States Government dashed all 
hoped of assistance from that quarter by suppressing raids over the 
Canadian frontier. 

In March Lord Russell's Reform Bill was introduced by Gladstone, 
who had succeeded Palmerston as leader of the Liberals in the House of 
Commons. The county franchise was to be lowered to .£14 and the 
borough franchise to £j. It was estimated that some four hundred 
thousand voters would thus be added to the register. The bill went far 
enough to excite the alarm of the Conservative element, but not far 
enough to arouse enthusiasm on the other side. It was opposed by a 
section of the Liberals who were nicknamed the " Adullamites " by John 
Bright, who likened them to the followers of the outlawed David. The 
bill passed its second reading by a majority of only five, and an adverse 
vote in committee induced the Government to resign. For the third time 
Lord Derby took office, with Disraeli as his Chancellor of the Exchequer 
and leader of the House of Commons. 

The introduction of the Reform Bill had been received in the country 
with apparent apathy, but its rejection aroused a surprising amount of 
resentment. A great Reform demonstration was announced to be held 
in Hyde Park. At the last moment the authorities closed the park gates, 
and it was not surprising that the mob which assembled broke down the 
park railings and behaved with considerable violence and disorderliness, 
though no very serious damage was done and no lives were lost. A 
vigorous oratorical campaign was opened in the country, and the result 
was that when Parliament met again at the beginning of 1867 Disraeli had 
persuaded his colleagues that they must carry a Reform Bill themselves. 

It was Disraeli's intention to follow the precedent of the India Act, 
removing the bill out of the sphere of party politics and proceeding by 
resolutions on which a bill was ultimately to be based. The plan failed. 
The central idea of Disraeli's scheme was to admit working-men to the 
franchise, but to check the power given them through their numerical 
preponderance by multiplying the votes of the educated and propertied 
classes. The last bill had been defeated on an adverse motion substituting 
rating for rental as the basis of qualification for the franchise, a difference 
of which the main effect was to exclude the "compound householder," the 
man who in paying his rent compounded for the rates which were paid not 
by him but by the landlord. Accordingly the resolutions for the new bill 
set £6 in the boroughs and ^20 in the counties, on the rating basis, as the 
qualification ; but sundry " fancy franchises " were added giving a separate 
vote apart from property qualification to ministers of religion, university 
graduates, and any one who had ^30 in the savings bank, .£50 in the 
funds, or who paid 20s. or more of income tax. The reception of the 
resolutions was unfavourable ; they were thereupon withdrawn under 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 885 

promise that a fresh bill should be formulated, and some Conservative 
stalwarts retired from the ministry, most notable among whom was Lord 
Cranborne, who was destined at a later day, as Marquess of Salisbury, to 
lead the Conservative party. 

The new bill when introduced proved to be more democratic than 
the resolutions. It proposed to give the franchise in the boroughs to all 
householders who paid their own rates, with a fifteen pound rating franchise 
in the counties. But the fancy franchises remained, with the further 
proviso that they conferred an extra vote on those persons possessing them 
who were otherwise qualified to vote as householders. The bill as it stood 
was acceptable neither to the advanced Liberals nor to the cautious 
Conservatives. Lord Derby himself described it as a " leap in the dark." 
To Disraeli it was a party bid for popular favour, intended, as Derby 
phrased it, to " dish the Whigs " ; but at the same time it expressed his 
own genuine convictions first that the people ought to be admitted to a 
larger share of political power, and, secondly, that education and intelligence 
should be called in to counterbalance the mere counting of heads. In the 
eyes of Liberals the fancy franchises were of course a mere party move 
to increase the influence of Conservative voters. The one unmistakable 
■ fact about the bill was that it would not go through unless it was made 
acceptable to the Opposition, and the Opposition was by no means at one. 
A number of Liberals voted against Gladstone's amendment that there should 
be a five pound rating limit, and that above that limit the compound house- 
holder should have the vote. Gladstone however recovered his mastery of 
the party, and it would be difficult to say whether the Act which was 
finally passed was more his or Disraeli's. Double votes and the fancy 
franchises disappeared. In boroughs the householder and the ^10 lodger 
were qualified after a year's residence. In the counties the qualification 
was lowered to ^12. The compound householder difficulty was solved by 
an amendment which abolished compounding in parliamentary boroughs. 
No borough with a population of less than ten thousand was to have two 
members. The members thus removed were in part added to the county 
representation, nine new boroughs were created, and six large towns 
acquired an additional member. Corresponding but not identical Acts 
were afterwards passed for Scotland and Ireland. The grand practical 
effect of the whole was that the urban working-man acquired a vote but 
the agricultural labourer did not. The latter remained without the franchise 
till seventeen years later. 

The Liberal Government had not succeeded in getting rid of the 
Fenian problem. The Derby administration found it necessary to main- 
tain and to renew the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and at first 
that policy seemed to be sufficiently effective. Nevertheless, early in 1867 
a series of sporadic insurrections took place in Ireland, apparently with 
the simple intention of keeping up a continual and ubiquitous disturbance ; 
for the armed bands were always easily dispersed, nor was popular 



886 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE * 

sympathy expressed by the usual method, the refusal of juries to convict. 
The Fenians, however, were not content with their efforts in Ireland. 
Early in the year a plot for capturing the castle and military stores at 
Chester was frustrated, and in September a desperate attempt was made 
at Manchester to release by force a couple of Fenians who had been 
arrested actually on a charge of burglary. A police officer was killed, and 
consequently three of the men concerned were hanged, somewhat un- 
fortunately, since it led to their glorification as the " Manchester Martyrs." 
Then came a desperate attempt to blow up a part of Clerkenwell gaol, 
resulting in the death of twelve persons and in injuries to some hundred 
more. Fenianism altogether failed to accomplish anything, and after the 
Clerkenwell affair it died out. But it was itself merely a symptom of the 
disaffection which had taken root not in Ireland itself but among the Irish 
in America, a disaffection which was still to play a serious part in the Irish 
problem. 

At the beginning of 1868 Lord Derby, whose health was failing, retired. 
However uneasy the Conservatives might feel under the audacious guidance 
of Disraeli, there was no man in either House whose claims to the party 
leadership could for a moment be compared to his, and he now became 
Prime Minister. He had already achieved the passage of a democratic re- 
form bill by a Conservative ministry, but only through repeated concessions 
to the Liberals. The Government held office under a tenure too precarious 
to last. It was perhaps the Fenian movement which established in the 
mind of Gladstone, the leader of the Opposition, the conviction that Irish 
unrest was to be removed by attacking its root causes, which in his view 
were the religious and agrarian difficulties. If these were removed it was 
still his conviction that the political grievance would be found to have no 
independent life. Ireland, therefore, was selected as the point of attack. 
Always a fervent Churchman, Gladstone until recently had been a strong 
upholder of all ecclesiastical claims. Latterly, however, he had spoken 
ominously concerning the position of the Church in Ireland, and he now 
brought forward resolutions in favour of Irish Disestablishment. The 
Government was defeated, but Disraeli's proposal, that the Scottish and 
Irish Acts consequent upon the English Reform Act should be passed in the 
summer and that there should be an autumn dissolution, was accepted. 
The appeal was made to the new constituencies in November, and the 
new constituencies returned the Liberals with a decisive majority of one 
hundred and twelve. 

Since the death of Palmerston the policy of non-intervention in Europe 
had been followed on the same principles as before by both Governments, 
though with an avoidance of the indiscretions which had occasionally 
given it such an unfortunate colour. Austria and Prussia were left to 
fight out their struggle for supremacy in Germany in the brief but decisive 
Seven Weeks War of 1866 ; while the diplomacy of Lord Stanley at the 
Foreign Office was of material influence in averting the immediate danger 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 887 

of a war between France and Prussia. Outside Europe the conduct of 
Theodore, the u Negus " of Abyssinia, in imprisoning sundry British 
officials and other residents, necessitated the despatch of an expedition to 
that country at the beginning of 1868. The command was given to Sir 
Robert Napier. The campaign was conducted with entire success. It 
was inglorious because the resistance offered by the enemy was merely 
futile, but the highest praise was due to the commander because it was 
conducted in an extremely difficult country, while the utmost rapidity of 
movement was essential in order to ensure the withdrawal of the forces 
before the summer. Napier's army was drawn from India, but it is not 
easy to perceive how the British Government justified itself in charging 
India with the cost of the expedition. 

The reorganisation in India, in the years following the Mutiny, under 
Canning, Elgin, and Lawrence, cannot be adequately described without 
entering upon technicalities more fully than is possible in these pages. 
Certain points however may be noted. Dalhousie's policy of refusing to 
recognise adoptions was explicitly set aside. The Ondh talukdars found 
that the government was ready to make full allowance for the misappre- 
hensions under which they had at the last revolted ; their treatment was 
acknowledged by themselves as generous, and they became once more 
thoroughly loyal. All the princes who had remained faithful found their 
services amply recognised ; and beyond the border Lord Lawrence laid 
down those principles of non-intervention and " masterly inactivity " in 
Afghanistan which were presently to be challenged by the advocates of what 
is called the Forward Policy. On the death of Dost Mohammed the 
various claimants 1 to the succession were left to fight out their own quarrels, 
and it was not until all rivals had been crushed or expelled that the British 
Government definitely recognised the Amir Sher Ali as the friendly ruler 
of an independent state. 

In the colonies the close of 1865 witnessed an unhappy episode in 
Jamaica. An insurrection of the black population was attributed largely 
to the inflammatory language used by a native proprietor and preacher, 
George William Gordon. The insurrection was sharply suppressed by 
Governor Eyre, whose previous record proved his natural inclination to 
deal sympathetically with native populations. Martial law was proclaimed 
and Gordon was arrested, sentenced by a court-martial, and put to death. 
The severity however with which the insurrection was suppressed, the numer- 
ous executions, and the floggings to which women as well as men were sub- 
jected, created intense indignation in England ; while, on the other hand, 
there was a powerful party which insisted that the principles of govern- 
ment applicable to white races are not applicable to black populations, with 
whom severities are necessary which would be wantonly brutal if employed 
in a European community. On the whole, in spite of many great names 
in the list of those who headed the attack on the governor, public opinion 
condoned if it did not entirely endorse his action. All parties, it may be 



888 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

said, agreed in principle that the rights of coloured races must be protected, 
while the supremacy of the white race must be maintained ; but there is an 
eternal antagonism over individual cases in which the two principles come 
into conflict. 

One event of supreme importance in the history of the British Empire 
remains to be recorded here. By an Act in 1867, the British North 
America Act, the colonies were authorised to unite under a federal govern- 
ment. All the North American colonies with the exception of Newfound- 
land came into the new arrangement and formed the great Dominion of 
Canada, the separate colonies or states having their own governments for 
the control of their own affairs, while those which are the common concern 
of all were in the hands of the single central government. Thus began 
that system of associating the colonies into federated groups in which 
present-day Imperialism is rinding the solution of the problem of combin- 
ing self-government with imperial unity. 



VI 

MID-VICTORIAN 

In the years which passed between 1852 and 1869 great events 
occupied public attention — the establishment of the Second Empire in 
France, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Unification of Italy, the 
American Civil War, and the decisive contest between Austria and Prussia. 
They ended with the Act which transformed the British House of Commons, 
at the instance of a Conservative ministry, into a body representing a 
democratic instead of a bourgeois electorate. But they were years in 
which domestic progress flowed on and the tide of material prosperity rose 
higher and higher, undisturbed and unaided by any heroic legislation or 
startling innovations. No sweeping changes came over the face of the 
land ; no mechanical inventions broke in upon the consistent development 
of the established system of manufacture, of traffic and of commerce. 

The great names which had come to the front in literature in the 
previous twenty years were still the leading names, though in poetry they 
were most notably reinforced by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Rossetti, 
and among novelists by George Eliot and Charles Reade. Still more 
characteristic of the period, however, as finished expressions of its placid 
conventions, were the by no means profound works of Anthony Trollope 
and Charlotte Yonge. While poets and novelists accomplished work of 
the highest rank, and in work sometimes of a much lower order produced 
photographic pictures of the life and manners and customs of mid-Victorian 
upper middle-class life ; while Carlyle and Ruskin, each after his own 
inspiring, if occasionally erratic, fashion, upheld moral ideals to an age 
which presented itself to their eyes as drearily materialistic and hidebound 




WINNIPEG IN 187O 

In the background is Fort Garry. On this site now stands the Union Station of the Grand Trunk 
Railway. From a painting of 1870 in the possession of the Canadian Government. 




WINNIPEG IN I9I 2 
The building in foreground is the Bank of Montreal. 




THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 889 

by conventions — the most distinctive intellectual work of the day was 
being accomplished in another field. At the beginning and at the end of 
the seventeenth century the achievements of Francis Bacon and Isaac 
Newton had marked epochs, turning points, in the history of human 
thought. Another such epoch was now marked by the publication in 
1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Already the geologists 
had alarmed religious orthodoxy by their demonstrations of the world's 
antiquity, proofs that it had not 
been created precisely in the first 
week of the year 4004 B.C. The 
exact and literal interpretation of 
Scripture as an inspired record 
not only of spiritual truths but of 
material historical facts, a record 
of which no single word might 
be gainsaid, now suffered an in- 
finitely more damaging blow from 
the biologists. An investigator of 
infinite patience, a whole-hearted 
seeker after truth, was able to 
place before the world a pro- j 
visional demonstration that the ^ 
infinitely varied forms of life in 
the world were not the outcome .- 
of a single creative act, but had 
been evolved through countless w 
years from one infinitesimal pri- ^ 

mordial type. Man himself was 
but the most perfect type to 
which evolution had attained. 
Species had become differentiated 

by the transmission of inherited characteristics. If those characteristics 
rendered them better adapted to their environment they survived ; if not, 
they perished. It appeared at first sight that if this theory were true the 
formulas of orthodoxy must be false fundamentally. It was only by slow 
degrees that men realised the true significance of the doctrine of evolution 
and the moral and spiritual insignificance of the conventional beliefs which 
it displaced, just as they had taken a very long time to realise that the truth 
of Christianity was compatible with the truths of astronomy. Orthodoxy 
had to readjust its formulae to the newly ascertained facts, though it pre- 
sently discovered that the readjustment touched nothing fundamental. 
But the misapprehensions were not confined to the orthodox, and a 
sceptical philosophy was generated, based upon biology, of which the 
most brilliant popular exponent was Professor Huxley, while Herbert 
Spencer was its high priest. 







Charles Darwin. 
[ From a medallion by Alphonse Legros. ] 



890 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

If the principle of laissez /aire in commerce was thoroughly established 
by Peel and carried to completion by Gladstone, its rejection in the 
relations between capital and labour was hardly less definite. The Factory 
Acts, that is to say, reasserted the old doctrine that the state was warranted 
in intervening for the sake of the public good even at a certain economic 
risk. The advocates of intervention, indeed, generally denied the economic 
risk, claiming that profits would not be diminished by the restrictions 
imposed; but at the bottom of the public support lay the conviction that 
the intervention would still be morally justified even if the profits of trade 
were reduced. The restrictions, however,, on unqualified competition were 
applied with definite limitations which emphasised their origin as moral, not 
economic. They were employed exclusively for the protection first of 
children and then of women from excessive labour tending to the physical 
and moral deterioration of the race. Grown men must take care of 
themselves, and must be left to unqualified competition so far as the 
state was concerned. 

The whole process of restriction, moreover, was tentative and experi- 
mental. It was at first brought to bear only on specific employments 
in which experimentation was comparatively easy, or where, as in the 
case of the collieries, the evils born of non-intervention were particularly 
flagrant. But it followed that during the succeeding years the experiment 
was extended to other trades and was carried further in the trades to which 
it applied. Thus textile factories were at first alone subject to its opera- 
tion, but in the fifties and sixties other allied trades were brought 
within the compass of the Factory Acts, then trades such as pottery, 
which were not allied to them ; and, finally, in 1867 the Factories and 
Workshops Act defined the factories where the regulations were ap- 
plicable as covering all premises where more than fifty persons were 
employed on any manufacturing process. Also during these years there 
was an increasing disposition to impose regulations of a definitely sanitary 
character, and requiring the employers to fence their machinery and 
to take other precautions for protection against accidents. There were, 
no doubt, always employers who declared that every fresh restriction 
placed them at a disadvantage with the foreign competitor, but there 
was never any appearance that the British manufacturer failed to obtain 
adequate profits. 

The men were left to themselves, and there was a steady advance 
of the new trade unionism exemplified by the Engineers' Society. The 
new unionism was not bellicose ; nevertheless in 1859 there was another 
great contest between masters and men in the building trade. The 
strength of the men's organisation led the masters to resolve not merely 
to refuse to recognise the unions but to break them up at least as militant 
organisations. A local strike was met by a general lock-out. The struggle 
lasted for a long time ; finally the men did not obtain the concessions for 
which they had originally struck, but, on the other hand, the masters were 



THE PALMERSTONIAN ERA 891 

obliged to withdraw their demand that the men should separate themselves 
from the unions. 

Now the new unionism represented by the great societies may be 
said to have had a double aim — to enforce all round conditions which 
the most liberal masters were willing to concede, and to procure legisla- 
tion which would strengthen their own hands. They did not want state 
regulation, but they wanted a legal status which would enable them to 
bargain more effectively. It was therefore in their interest to be recognised 
as law-abiding bodies. But there were many among the workmen who 
were not satisfied with what may be called constitutional methods. The 
prominently violent action of some of these minor unions, wholly opposed 
though it was to the spirit of the principal bodies, was naturally looked 
upon by the public as characteristic of the whole trade union movement. 
The result was that in 1867 there was a commission of enquiry which was 
eagerly courted by the leading unions. While the enquiry resulted in 
a report of a character immensely more favourable to the unions than had 
been generally anticipated, a judicial decision in the same year stamped 
them as illegal associations, which consequently had no power at law to 
protect their own funds from malversation. It thus became decisively 
clear that trade unions would in future be practically powerless until they 
acquired a recognised legal status. That was the work of the next period, 
when the Reform Bill had given the working man a parliamentary vote. 

The year however also witnessed an Act which removed a serious 
inequality. Theoretically the law applied the same treatment to employers 
and employed, but in actual fact it did not. In the case of a contract 
between " master and servant," which covered contracts of service generally, 
the master who broke the contract could only be sued for damages, but 
the servant who did so committed not a civil but a criminal offence, 
consequently the latter could not give evidence in his own defence ; he 
was liable to imprisonment, and might be tried before a justice of the peace, 
who, on such questions, could hardly be regarded as an unbiassed judge. 
The Masters and Servants Act, procured in effect by the action of certain 
northern trade unions, and passed by the Derby Government, remedied 
the worst features of the existing law in this respect. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

DEMOCRACY 
I 

EUROPE 

The years of the last Russell and Derby administrations and the early- 
years of the first Gladstone administration were marked by events on the 
Continent which almost amounted to a revolution of the European system, 
through Prussia's two great contests first with Austria and then with 
France. Those contests incidentally secured the completion of United 
Italy. To any one born within the last fifty years "Germany" means a 
consolidated German Empire wielding the most highly organised army in 
Europe, a military power which it is assumed that no other nation could 
defeat single-handed. In the popular mind Austria, however closely allied 
with the German Empire, is as completely distinct from it as Russia or 
France or Italy. The unity of Italy is taken for granted no less than the 
unity of Germany. Nevertheless, in 1865 a great section of Northern Italy 
was still a province of the Austrian Empire, while Germany was at best 
a confederation of independent states, among which Austria rather than 
Prussia still exercised a sort of presidency. To Austria, in fact, still clung 
the tradition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, which had in effect been 
essentially Germanic ever since it was created by Charlemagne. Not till 
the days of Frederick the Great had the King of Prussia acquired among 
the German princes a position which made it possible to challenge the 
Austrian ascendency. Never at all had there been a consolidated German 
Empire, a Germany standing as a united nation among the other nations of 
Europe. The creation of a united Germany was the work of Otto Von 
Bismarck, the great minister of William, King of Prussia, in association 
with the great soldier Moltke. 

The name of Germany, then, like the name of Italy, was little more 
than a geographical expression covering a number of loosely associated 
Teutonic kingdoms and principalities, two of which ranked among the first- 
class Powers ; while to one of these two, Austria, tradition assigned a sort 
of leadership. But of the Austrian Empire only a portion was Teutonic, 
the greater part of the dominion being either Slav or Magyar. Bismarck's 
great aim was to transform this loose association of German states into a 
solid unity ; but in a United Germany there would be no room for Austria. 



DEMOCRACY 893 

Prussia must be supreme, and she could not be supreme unless Austria 
were entirely excluded. 

The first business, therefore, was to secure the ejection of Austria and 
the acceptance of Prussian ascendency. There would have to be a war 
between Prussia and Austria, and Austria would have to be decisively 
beaten. The war, then, must be procured at the moment and under con- 
ditions which would ensure victory. No one outside Prussia knew the 
perfection with which the military machine was being organised. Bismarck 
timed his arrangements with consummate precision. The neutrality of the 
British and the Russians could be reckoned upon ; that of France was 
secured through Napoleon's complete miscalculation of the odds. He 
anticipated that Prussia would be soundly beaten, that he would be able to 
intervene at the right moment to shield her from destruction, and that he 
would reap his reward on the Rhine. Italy was drawn into active partici- 
pation, with Venetia — the completion of a united Italy — as her reward. In 
1866 Austria was manoeuvred into a quarrel at the right moment, with a 
sufficient appearance of her being the aggressor, and war was declared. In 
Italy the Italians were defeated ; but in Austria the brief Prussian campaign 
was absolutely decisive. The victory of Sadowa or Koniggratz wrecked 
the Austrian army, and Bismarck was able to dictate his terms, which were 
not vindictive. Italy was rewarded with Venetia, Prussia annexed Hanover 
and some other minor principalities ; the general German confederation 
was dissolved, and a new North German confederation was established 
practically under Prussian direction. South Germany was as yet excluded. 
The complete unification of Germany was still to wait for a very little 
while, until the South German states should learn to realise that their own 
interest was engaged in it. 

The outcome of the " Seven Weeks War " was not at all what Napoleon 
had desired. Bismarck had got what he wanted without French help, and 
what the Emperor had wanted he entirely failed to obtain. The danger 
now to the completion of Bismarck's plans lay not in Austria but in France. 
It was his object therefore to crush that danger, but not to fight till he 
could strike with certainty of victory. Four years after Sadowa he was 
ready for a decisive struggle. The proposal for placing a Hohenzollern 
prince on the vacant throne of Spain gave him his opportunity of forcing 
a war upon France for which public opinion in France was at the moment 
more than willing. As with Austria, so now, Prussia had a plausible case 
for maintaining that France was the aggressor — that it was France which 
forced the war. Again, as in the case of Austria, the perfection of the 
Prussian military organisation, now extended over the North German con- 
federation, coupled with the support of South Germany, gave the Prussians 
or Germans decisive victory. When peace was made after the fall of Paris 
Alsace and Lorraine were surrendered to Prussia, and a terrific war indemnity 
was imposed upon the French nation. 

But the cession of territory and the indemnity were not the only results. 



894 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

The French Empire collapsed when the Emperor himself surrendered at 
Sedan. For the third time France became a republic, with a government 
which for many years was necessarily unstable. But, on the other hand, 
while the besieging armies lay before Paris, the King of Prussia was pro- 
claimed German Emperor, the Southern States uniting with those of the 
North German confederation to form a single union with the King of 
Prussia at its head. Germany had become the greatest military power in 
the European system. The new German Empire was born, like the fully 
armed Pallas Athene of Greek mythology. 

Incidentally Italy had seized her opportunity, when the French Emperor 
was no longer in a position to shield the Papacy, to crown her unity by 
taking possession of Rome and making it the capital of United Italy. 



II 

THE GLADSTONE ADMINISTRATION 

Lord Russell's public activities had ceased on his retirement from office 
in 1866, when he was already seventy-four years of age ; Gladstone was 
marked out as the leader of the Liberal party, as emphatically as Disraeli 
was distinguished among the Conservatives. For twelve years to come 
those two personalities entirely overshadowed all others in parliament, and 
the rivalry only ended with Lord Beaconsfield's death in 1881. 

Gladstone, as we have noted, had already come to the conclusion that 
the endless troubles in Ireland must be met by dealing with two questions 
in which he found a legitimate cause of grievance, the Established Church 
and the land system. The Irish Church question he brought definitely to 
the forefront while Disraeli was in office in 1868, and he had united the 
Liberals in determining upon disestablishment. In Ireland, as in England, 
the technical continuity of the Church as a religious corporation had been 
preserved in Tudor times. Apart from confiscations, the Reformed Church 
retained the wealth which had belonged to the Church before the Reforma- 
tion. But the Reformed Church was never at any time the Church of 
more than one-fourth of the Irish people. It was a National Church only 
in the sense that it was recognised as such by the state. Obviously it 
could be argued with equal plausibility that the Church in the nineteenth 
century was one and the same with the Church a thousand years before, 
and was entitled to all that it had then possessed or that had subsequently 
been bestowed upon it — or, on the other hand, that the Church was not 
one and the same, that the Romanist priesthood, not the Anglicans, were 
the real successors of the Church, and that as a matter of fact all property 
bestowed upon it was merely held by it in trust, by the sanction of the 
state, upon condition of its fulfilling the office of a National Church. 



DEMOCRACY 895 

Since in the Liberal view it did not fulfil that office, it was legitimate for 
the state to appropriate that wealth to national purposes. 

Next, the two arguments stood opposed — on one side that the state in 
a Christian country ought to make profession of its Christianity, which it 
could only do by supporting and recognising a National Christian Church, 
and, on the other, that while Christianity was divided into sects the state as 
such ought not to recognise one sect in preference to the rest ; to which 
was added the contention that endowments and connection with the state 
in fact tend to weaken the activities of 
the Church and to destroy its spiritual 
independence, an argument which in- 
volved the rejection of counter-pro- 
posals for the concurrent endowment 
of other religious bodies. Apart from 
such abstract questions there was the 
concrete difficulty that institutions and 
individuals derived their stipends from 
these endowments, which the usage of 
centuries had entitled them to count 
upon, and of which they could not be 
deprived without flagrant injustice. 

The measure proposed by Glad- 
stone took full account of this last 
consideration. All life interests were 
secured, .£10,000,000 out of the 
/16, 000, 000 at which the wealth of 
the Church was valued being restored 
to it. At one stage it seemed likely 
that there would be a sharp conflict 
between the Commons and the Lords, 
since the Lords sent down amend- 
ments which were for the most part rejected by Gladstone. They were 
satisfied however with a show of compromise, practically arranged between 
Lord Granville and Lord Cairns for the Liberals and Conservatives respec- 
tively, and the bill became law. In its final form the uses to which the 
surplus was to be put. were not specified, but were left to the pleasure of 
parliament. 

With his next measure Gladstone embarked upon that troubled sea of 
Irish legislation which provided abundant occupation for Liberal and Con- 
servative governments until after the twentieth century had opened. Theo- 
retically in Ireland, as in England, the occupation of the land was for the 
most part a matter of contract between landlord and tenant ; the terms were 
settled by simple bargaining, modified in practice by local customs which 
however had not the force of law. But in fact the conditions in Ireland 
and in England were entirely different. In England the contract was corn- 




Mr. Gladstone in 186c 

[From a photograph.] 



896 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

paratively at least a free one ; the diversity of employments open to the 
small capitalists who occupied the soil compelled the landlords to lease 
their farms upon reasonable terms, and improvements were for the most 
part carried out either wholly or partly at the landlord's expense. In 
Ireland, on the other hand, the occupier of the soil was a poor man who, 
if he left his holding, would find it exceedingly difficult to get any other em- 
ployment. In effect he had to accept the terms that were offered him. 
And the Irish landlords, though of course with notable exceptions, were 
either unable or unwilling to sink their money on improvements. Conse- 
quently, if improvements were made at all, the tenant was apt to find 
that he paid for making them and that the landlord then pocketed the 
profits by increasing the rent. 

Gladstone's Land Bill, then, proposed to provide by law two of the 
three conditions of a healthy and progressive occupancy which in England 
were practically secured without any direct application of law — fair rents, 
fixity of tenure, and free transfer, involving the tenant's right to have his 
property in improvements which he had effected recognised. But this 
could only be done by interfering with freedom of contract, which was held 
to be justified by the argument that the contracts interfered with were not 
in fact free. In Ireland the tenant was usually a tenant at will, occupying 
only under an agreement without any written lease, and liable to be simply 
evicted on six months notice. But the " Ulster custom " habitually observed 
by Ulster landlords, though it could not be enforced in law courts, forbade 
the eviction of a tenant who paid his rent, and allowed him to sell the 
goodwill of his tenancy — in other words, the value of such improvements 
as he had made — to some one else if he wished to part from his holding. 
The Ulster custom in effect recognised fixity of tenure and freedom of sale. 
The bill proposed to give this custom the force of law, thereby in effect 
establishing a joint proprietary. Land however could under this bill be 
granted on long leases, free from these restrictions ; on the other hand, the 
tenant at will who was evicted for other reasons than the non-payment of 
rent could claim compensation for disturbance as well as for improvements. 
Also public loans were authorised in order to enable tenants who so desired 
to purchase their holdings ; that is, it was attempted to provide means for 
establishing a peasant proprietary by the side of the dual proprietary. 
There was no machinery however for securing fair rents. The bill became 
law in 1870, the year after the Disestablishment Act. 

Still the introduction, with a pacificatory intent, of these two measures 
failed to produce pacification. Though the Fenian movement had not 
been agrarian, it had revived the spirit of hostility to the law among the 
agrarian population ; and the disturbed state of the country caused a 
second bill to be accompanied by the Peace Preservation Act, forbidding 
the carrying of arms in proclaimed districts, and increasing the powers of 
the police and the summary jurisdiction of the magistracy. Irish Nationalist 
sentiment began to take shape as a demand for an undefined " Home 



DEMOCRACY 897 

Rule " professedly differing both from the unqualified separatism of the 
Fenians and from O'Connell's old demand for the repeal of the Act of 
Union. 

If Ireland occupied the first place in Gladstone's programme, the first 
democratic parliament was also necessarily zealous for the amelioration of 
popular conditions in England. The lack of education and of educational 
possibilities among the poorer classes attracted, as we saw, periodical atten- 
tion after the passing of the great Reform Bill ; but the result had been 
little more than the application of a 
slowly increased government grant in 
aid of schools maintained for the 
most part by voluntary support, under 
the control commonly of the Church 
of England, but in some cases of 
other religious bodies. The admission 
of the working-man to the franchise 
had extracted from a prominent 
Adullamite, Robert Lowe, the remark 
that we ''must educate our masters," 
and at last the education of the 
children of the poor was recognised 
as a matter which must be taken in 
hand directly by the government. 

The result was W. E. Forster's 
great Education Act of 1870. The 
voluntary schools were wholly unable 
to cope with the vast amount of 
work that had to be done, and hosts 
of children got no teaching at all 
because there was no accommodation, 
and no superfluous zeal on the part 

of parents in seeking to obtain it. The essential principle of the scheme 
was to provide sufficient accommodation for all children, to make school 
attendance compulsory and contributory — that is, to require the parents to 
pay something towards the cost — but to throw the bulk of the expense 
upon the public at large, the provision being made not by the central 
government but locally through the rates. The new schools were to 
subsist side by side with the voluntary schools. 

But the difficulty of religious instruction at once presented itself. The 
great consensus of public opinion demanded unmistakably that there should 
be religious instruction ; but it seemed equally clear that in schools main- 
tained by public funds drawn from the pockets of persons of every kind of 
religious denomination, the teaching should not be that of any one denomi- 
nation. The difficulty of applying a government grant to Church schools 
had been surmounted by a conscience clause, which permitted parents to 

1 L 




W. E. Forster. 

[From a photograph.] 



898 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

withdraw their children from the religious instruction ; but if the same 
principle were applied in the new state-supported schools, the children of 
Nonconformists would be shut out from religious instruction altogether ; 
while it did not appear practicable to adopt the alternative of providing special 
religious instruction for each denomination. The solution was found in 
the " Cowper-Temple Clause," which required that no formularies of any 
religious denomination should be employed, but that undenominational 
Biblical instruction should be given ; a compromise with which the 
majority of the public were satisfied, since the position of the definite 
Church and other denominational schools remained unaltered. All the 
schools were to be under government inspection, and the general control 
in each district was to be in the hands of the locally elected School 
Board. 

Another question was necessarily brought into prominence in a parlia- 
ment representing an electorate largely composed of the working-classes. 
This was the regulation of the position of trade unions. As matters stood 
in 1868 the trade union was an illegal association. It could not protect 
its own funds, even although those funds might be mainly used not for 
militant purposes, but for sick pay and other benefits. The law of Con- 
spiracy had proved to be so elastic as to make practically any action in 
furtherance of a strike a punishable offence. To make combination an 
effective method by which the men could bargain collectively with the 
masters, it was necessary that the existence of the unions should be 
legalised, but that they should not be liable to be sued as corporate bodies, 
since they would then be open to ceaseless attacks involving a perpetual 
and paralysing litigation. Further, it was necessary that it should be legal 
for men to do jointly what it was legal for an individual to do ; that is, that 
an action should not be rendered criminal because it was committed by 
persons acting in concert instead of singly, or, again, because the person 
who committed it was what the law called a " servant." 

The Government however was by no means eager to move. Under 
pressure it at last brought in a bill which was subsequently divided into 
two. By the one, the unions were allowed to register themselves as legally 
constituted societies, while, as was universally understood, they were pro- 
tected from being sued as corporations. The second, called the Criminal 
Law Amendment Act, sought to summarise and define the coercive acts 
which might be penalised. It did not introduce new penalties, but it so 
defined the law that, while it declared the strike or joint withdrawal from 
work to be legal, it declared every action by which the strike could be 
rendered effective to be illegal, including the mere publication or com- 
munication of the fact that a strike had been declared. Violence or threats 
were unnecessary. Any kind of persuasion to abstain from working in a 
place where a strike had been declared was " molestation " within the 
meaning of the law. To this position the Government held resolutely, 
with the result that employers fastened upon the first bill as having made 



DEMOCRACY 899 

trade unions dangerously powerful, while the union men fastened upon the 
second bill as having completely paralysed them. 

The Government then very emphatically lost favour with the working 
classes, and they did little to recover it by the introduction of the ballot, 
one of the old demands of the Chartists. The ballot enabled the voter to 
cast his vote without any one knowing on which side he had voted unless 
he chose himself to give the information, and was intended to secure him 
against giving it under virtual intimidation, though it was only to a limited 
extent that it actually served the purpose intended. 

The Franco-Prussian War, with its startling demonstration of the 
military power of Germany, led to a much needed reorganisation of the 
British Army. One of the proposed changes encountered the most 
vehement opposition. This was the abolition of the purchase system, 
by which officers were able to buy promotion. That system had been 
established by royal warrant, and, in the face of the determined opposition 
to the bill on the part of the House of Lords, Gladstone took the un- 
expected course of abolishing it by royal warrant, a step which was 
vigorously condemned as unconstitutional. 

If the domestic methods of the Government tended to diminish its 
popularity, this was still more the case with its conduct of foreign affairs. 
It successfully maintained the attitude of neutrality throughout the 
European war, and in some degree reduced the severity of the terms 
imposed by the Germans upon the French. Nevertheless, there was a 
good deal of popular feeling that British intervention ought to have been 
carried further, and that the dignity and power of the nation should have 
been emphasised more vigorously and decisively. The impression that 
ministers allowed themselves to be brow-beaten by foreign Powers was 
intensified by two grave diplomatic defeats. Russia seized the opportunity 
of Napoleon's fall to announce her repudiation of the Black Sea Treaty. 
Britain was able to insist upon the position that no single Power had a 
right to withdrawal, and that grievances must be referred to a conference 
of the signatory Powers. To this Russia acceded ; but at the conference 
held in London her diplomacy procured everything she demanded. 
Britain in effect found herself isolated, and the clauses neutralising the 
Black Sea were cancelled. 

The second defeat was suffered over the United States claim for 
compensation in connection with the Alabama. In 187 1 the British, who 
refused to admit any liability for the injuries done by the cruisers, agreed 
to the appointment of a joint commission to settle the question. The 
American commissioners proposed that a lump sum should be paid to 
cover all claims. The British suggested arbitration. The Americans 
agreed, on condition that certain views of their own upon international 
law should be accepted as a preliminary. The British allowed their 
acceptance, while denying that they had as a matter of fact been valid 
heretofore. British counter-claims in respect of damage done by Fenian 



9 oo THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

raids were withdrawn from the arbitration, which was referred to a court 
whose members were nominated by various European sovereigns. The 
court awarded damages, chiefly in respect of the Alabama, amounting to 
15,500,000 dollars, to the intense disgust of the British people, who 
jumped to the somewhat hasty conclusion that any court composed of 
foreign arbitrators might be relied upon to give an anti-British verdict. 
The mere fact that such an arbitration had been attempted at all was a 
great step towards finding peaceful solutions for differences of a certain 
type ; but it did not add to the prestige of the Government at the time. 

The Prime Minister appears to have been unconscious of the extent to 
which the Government was losing popularity in the country. Nevertheless, 
when in 1873 a bill dealing with the Irish Universities was defeated and 
Gladstone resigned, Disraeli refused to take office, which was resumed by 
Gladstone. In this last year of the administration there was another 
Ashanti expedition, in which the actual operations were skilfully conducted 
by Sir Garnet Wolseley. But before this necessarily inglorious war was 
finished a general election at the beginning of 1874 returned the Conser- 
vatives to power. The Liberal ministry was weakened by dissensions, but 
Gladstone expected that an appeal to the country would give him a fresh 
lease of power. He had a large surplus, and believed that the long desired 
time had come when the income tax could once more be taken off, a con- 
summation which he had always desired. His intention was to substitute 
for it an increase of the succession duties, the charges payable when 
property passed by inheritance. The announcement of his intention was 
denounced as a trick for catching votes. The government measures had 
aroused the indignation of one section of the community after another — 
Churchmen and Dissenters, the Army, the landowners, the licensed victuallers 
(a particularly dangerous body when their hostility was aroused), the 
manufacturers, and the working-men. This last group, who at the previous 
general election had voted for the Liberals, now in their irritation at the 
Criminal Law Amendment Act ran several independent candidates of their 
own, with the almost unfailing result that the Conservatives headed the 
poll ; and that party returned to power with a solid majority. 



Ill 

BEACONSFIELD 

According to the Conservative theory the country did not want heroic 
legislation and reconstruction such as the Liberals had attempted, but 
minor reforms which would make life work more smoothly for the working 
classes. In the philanthropic legislation of the past the Conservatives had 
been quite as active as the Liberals, since orthodox Liberalism was closely 
associated with the manufacturing class, and had been largely dominated 



DEMOCRACY 901 

by the economic theories of what was called the Manchester School, the 
doctrines of unqualified competition. Though it was true that there had 
always been a Radical wing with sympathies very much more democratic 
and humanitarian than those of the official Liberals, it was not particularly 
difficult for the Conservatives to claim that they were the true friends of 
the working-man. It was therefore the Conservatives not the Liberals who 
now threw over the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and did actually give 
to the trade unions all that they had demanded. The application of the 
Conspiracy Law to trade disputes was limited. The terms "employer" 
and " workman " were substituted for those of " master " and " servant " in 
a new Act which made the agreements between them a simple civil contract, 
in which the two parties stood on the same legal footing. The " coercion " 
and " molestation " of the Criminal Law Amendment Act disappeared ; 
persuasion which stopped short of violence or actual intimidation ceased to 
be punishable, and peaceful picketing was expressly sanctioned. Also a 
Nine Hours' Bill, limiting the work of women and children to nine hours, 
was now obtained by the Lancashire cotton spinners, though the Liberal 
Government had stubbornly refused it. Again, as the friends of the people, 
the Conservatives passed a series of Acts — an Agricultural Holdings Act, a 
Labourers' Dwellings Act, and others — which would have been extremely 
useful to the working classes if they had been compulsory. As they were 
merely permissive, the practical benefits derived from them were open to 
question, since in one group of cases local authorities made little use of the 
powers conveyed to them, while in others one party could practically insist 
upon the other agreeing to " contract out." In fact, among Liberals as well 
as among Conservatives there was still a strong feeling against interfering 
with freedom of contract. It remained for later parliaments to apply 
the principle that in actual fact such contracts very rarely are i\ ^e and 
the desired end can only be secured by compulsion. For Ireland, alter the 
sweeping measures of 1869 and 1870, the Government had no legislation 
to offer except the renewal of the Peace Preservation Act, which appeared 
to have been attended by entirely satisfactory results. 

The real interest, however, of the Beaconsfield administration — so called 
because during 1876 Disraeli withdrew from the Commons to the Lords, 
with the title of Earl of Beaconsfield — lies in the revival of British activity 
in the field of foreign- politics. The policy of non-intervention had been 
professed theoretically by every British minister from Castlereagh and 
Canning down to Palmerston and Gladstone ; but the interpretations and 
applications of the policy had followed exceedingly diverse lines. With 
Canning and Palmerston it had at least been a first principle to insist that 
their voices should be heard in the councils of Europe ; that Britain was 
not to be treated as a negligible quantity. On the other hand, another 
school, at this time dominant in the Liberal party, was disposed to be 
somewhat ostentatiously pacific ; and the results of their diplomacy during 
the late administration had undoubtedly been viewed with extreme dissatis- 



902 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

faction by the country. It was to the Conservatives not to the Liberals 
that the Palmerstonian tradition had passed. Disraeli, the most imaginative 
of English statesmen, adopted as his own the magnificent view of the high 
destinies of the British Empire and its moral supremacy among the nations ; 
also he was of opinion that the other nations should understand that it 
would in no way suffer its own interests to be ignored. 

To those principles he added a predilection for startling and theatrical 
effects. Thus in 1875 he took the world by surprise with an exceedingly 
ingenious stroke which gave the British Government a dominant control 
over the Suez Canal, the new waterway from the Mediterranean to the Red 
Sea and the Indian Ocean. The canal itself had been constructed mainly 
by French enterprise and practically without British support. It was the 
property of a commercial company in which the dominant influence was 
French, while the Khedive of Egypt was by far the largest shareholder. But 
the Khedive was very much in want of cash, and contemplated the sale of 
his shares ; Disraeli was no sooner made aware of the fact than he fore- 
stalled all other buyers by purchasing shares for the British Government at 
a cost of .£4,000,000. It was obvious that circumstances might arise when 
British control would be of the utmost importance, but from a merely 
commercial point of view it was a sound investment for the nation. At 
the same time the entire unexpectedness of the step created an uneasy 
feeling in the minds of that very large portion of the British public which 
particularly dislikes being taken by surprise. The capture of the Canal 
shares emphasised the interest to Britain of Egypt, the Eastern Mediter- 
ranean, and, by consequence, the Turkish Empire. Disraeli inherited from 
Palmerston that statesman's views upon Russian aggression, and his policy 
towards Russia is the dominant feature of his administration both in its 
Europr an and in its Indian aspects. 

Thj root of the troubles in the Near East is always to be found in the 
Turkish government's treatment of its Christian subjects. A united Europe 
in which the great Powers trusted each other and each one might be counted 
upon to act with pure disinterestedness could always have brought the Turk 
to reason. But the Turk enjoyed a deep-seated conviction that the Powers 
distrusted each other, would never be roused into taking active steps in 
unison, and yet would never permit any one Power to take action inde- 
pendently. He had no objection to making the most satisfactory promises, 
but the promises never materialised in action. British statesmanship 
generally regarded the preservation of the Turkish Empire as necessary to 
British interests, and was equally convinced that Russia in her own interest 
desired Turkey's disintegration. Therefore while Britain might view favour- 
ably the application of a strictly joint pressure by the Powers upon Turkey, 
she was emphatically opposed to permitting the independent intervention 
of Russia. Germany regarded the whole question as secondary ; and 
Austria had no inclination to active intervention unless she could reap her 
reward in the Balkan States. 



DEMOCRACY 903 

In these circumstances the Porte suavely ignored the European concert, 
and continued its misrule in the mainly Slavonic and Christian provinces 
of the Balkans and of the Danube. Consequently in 1875, just before the 
purchase of the Suez Canal shares, the Western Provinces of Bosnia and 
Herzegovina revolted. In the following January the Powers, at the instance 
of Austria, addressed a note to the Porte without any tangible result. In 
the summer a series of palace revolutions ended by placing Abdul Hamid 
on the Turkish throne. Meanwhile the insurrections had spread to 
Montenegro, Servia, and Bulgaria, and England was startled and horrified 
by the appalling reports sent home by newspaper correspondents of the 
atrocities committed by Turkish troops in Bulgaria. A strong anti-Turkish 
agitation was set on foot. The continued failure of the Powers to influence 
the action of Turkey, which merely amused itself by promulgating empty 
projects of reforms, gave Russia excuse or justification for implying that 
if the Powers would not take effective action in concert, she would do so 
independently ; and in the spring of 1877 war was declared between Russia 
and Turkey. 

In England the anti-Turkish agitation had risen high, but it sank as the 
anti-Russian agitation rose. All the old suspicions of Russian intentions 
and Russian methods were excited to the highest pitch, and the magnificent 
defence of Plevna and of the Schipka Pass by the Turks against tremendous 
odds appealed powerfully to British sentiment. At the turn of the year 
the Russians had forced the Balkan passes and were moving towards 
Constantinople. The British Government made it clear that they regarded 
war with Russia as something more than a possibility, and their attitude 
in making active preparations was indubitably popular. Every barrel- 
organ in the country was grinding out the strains of the popular ditty, 
" We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do," which introduced the new 
term Jingoism, which has ever since held its own in political slang. The 
British fleet was despatched to the Sea of Marmora to protect British 
interests. But a few days later, on March 3rd, it was announced that Russia 
and Turkey had agreed upon the Treaty of San Stefano. 

The terms of the treaty were less alarming than had been anticipated ; 
but in Lord Beaconsfield's view Russia and Turkey were not to be permitted 
to settle matters on their own account. The Treaty of San Stefano must 
be referred to the Powers, in accordance with the Treaty of Paris. Russia 
declared her willingness to refer the treaty to the Powers, but reserved to 
herself the right of accepting or rejecting their proposals. Britain refused 
to attend the congress on such terms ; war appeared to be almost inevitable, 
and the Foreign Minister, Lord Derby, who was opposed to war, resigned. 
His place was taken by Lord Salisbury. Active preparations continued, 
and the country was again startled by the announcement that the Crown, 
without reference to Parliament, h?d ordered a contingent of Indian troops 
to be despatched to Malta. 

Nevertheless war was averted. Russia agreed to submit the treaty to 



904 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

a European congress to be held at Berlin. That change of attitude was 
due to a secret agreement negotiated by Lord Salisbury. Another secret 
agreement had been made with Turkey. The terms did not, in fact, insist 
upon all the objections which had been raised to the Treaty of San Stefano. 
Lord Beaconsfield, accompanied by Lord Salisbury, attended the Berlin 
Congress, and the practical outcome was a triumph for his diplomacy. 
Roumania, Servia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria north of the Balkans, were 
made independent principalities. Austria was to control the administration 
of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The reservation of Southern Bulgaria secured 
the Turkish frontier. This was the sum of the Russo-British bargain. 
But the Berlin Treaty did not touch the separate British treaty with Turkey, 
by which Britain gave an independent guarantee to defend the Turkish 
dominion in Asia by force of arms, and herself occupied the island of 
Cyprus. Turkey, of course, gave the usual promises with regard to the 
treatment of her Christian subjects and the introduction of necessary reforms. 
Lord Beaconsfield returned to England, having achieved the proverbial 
"Peace with honour." Thus in the summer of 1878 his government was 
at the high tide of its popularity ; yet in less than two years it had fallen. 

Of the troubles in India and Africa which contributed to this end we 
shall speak in the next sections. But apart from these, though submerged 
for the time by the popular excitement over the restored European prestige 
of Britain, was a latent sense of uneasiness caused by Lord Beaconsfield's de- 
votion to a policy of surprises, his habit of announcing decisive steps taken 
before the nation had any inkling of what was coming. That feeling sprang 
into renewed life as soon as the Government met with failures instead of 
successes. And at home nothing was done to attract popular favour. Lord 
Beaconsfield's programme had been expensive ; there was no relief of taxa- 
tion, and the country was passing through a period of depression for which 
the Government was held responsible. Beaconsfield's withdrawal to the 
House of Lords had left the Commons without a strong leader, and there 
Charles Stewart Parnell had organised the band of " Home Rule" Irishmen 
into an instrument for the prevention of all government. Every available 
form of the House was systematically employed to make the efficient con- 
duct of business impossible. In Ireland also he created the Land League, 
a body whose primary object was to insist upon fair rents and, if fair rents 
were refused, refusal to pay any rent at all, with the secondary intention 
of ultimately converting tenancies into ownership. At the same time he 
made it apparent that his own ultimate intention was at least to destroy the 
English ascendency, if not to sever Ireland from the British Empire. 

The inability of the leaders to control the House of Commons detracted 
from the dignity of the Government. In Afghanistan and Zululand there 
were disasters. At the end of 1879 Gladstone, who had retired from 
the active leadership of the Liberals, emerged from his comparative seclu- 
sion to denounce the ministry in his famous Mid-Lothian campaign. A 
bill was introduced by ministers to transfer the property and powers of 



DEMOCRACY 905 

the London water-companies to a single central body. It seemed likely 
to prove that the bargain proposed was a very bad one ; and the bill was 
unpopular. The Government had now held office for six years ; Lord 
Beaconsfield appealed to the country, and discovered too late that the 
country had turned against his policy. Of the 652 members returned to 
the House of Commons 349 were Liberals, and of the rest 60 were Irish 
Home Rulers. Beaconsfield resigned ; the Liberal party recognised, and 
its chiefs impressed upon the queen, that the electorate demanded a govern- 
ment with Gladstone at its head. 



IV 

INDIA 

One of the fast acts of the previous Conservative administration had 
been the appointment of Lord Mayo to the Indian viceroyalty in succession 
to Lord Lawrence. Lord Mayo was assassinated after achieving an un- 
expectedly high reputation, and the Liberals appointed Lord Northbrook 
in his place. Both Mayo and Northbrook maintained their predecessors' 
attitude towards Afghanistan, but a strong school of politicians was growing 
up in India who were dissatisfied with "masterly inactivity." In their 
view the persistent advance of Russia in Central Asia made it of extreme 
importance that there should be a rectification of the whole north-west 
frontier which should not only render it impregnable but should make 
it also an effective basis for military operations in and beyond Afghanistan. 
They held also that, however excellent the intentions of the particular 
ruler in Afghanistan might be, it was necessary to exercise a certain super- 
vision over that country in order to prevent Russia from planting her 
influence there, and to keep the British government in India supplied 
with really trustworthy information. These ideas were adopted by the 
Beaconsfield administration ; Lord Northbrook was not prepared to fall 
in with them ; and in 1876 he resigned, to be succeeded by Lord Lytton. 

It was at this moment that Disraeli had resolved upon another of his 
picturesque effects. It was one of Lord Lytton's earliest duties to hold 
a great Durbar or assembly of native princes in order to proclaim, on the 
first day of 1877, that the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland had resolved 
to add to her titles that of Empress of India, Kaisar-i-Hind. The step 
was viewed with considerable disapprobation at home, but Disraeli was 
probably right in believing that it would appeal to the imagination of the 
Indian peoples with whom pomp and ceremonial magnificence is a visible 
testimony to power. 

Whether the effects were great or small they were of an intangible 
.order ; not so was it with the Afghan policy of Lord Lytton. There could 
be no doubt in the mind of any one at all as to the real advantages which 



9 o6 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

would be derived from the presence of a British Resident at Kabul, on 
one condition — that his presence should be acceptable to the Amir and 
to the people of Afghanistan. The difficulty lay precisely in the fact 
that it was not acceptable. But Lord Lytton had made up his mind that 
it was necessary whether acceptable or not. Pressure was brought to bear 
upon the Amir to receive a British mission, and the Amir at once scented 
an intention on the part of the British to establish control over him 
through a Resident. He explained that a mission could not possibly be 
admitted. Relations became very much strained ; but active measures were 
postponed in view of the then imminent danger of a European war. The 
war was averted, but the Berlin Treaty was followed by increased activity 
on the part of Russian agents in Asia. Lord Lytton learnt that a Russian 







The British Residency, Kabul, after the rising of 1879. 

mission had been received at Kabul. There could be no excuse then for 
refusing a British mission. He again announced that a British mission 
would be sent to Kabul with Sir Neville Chamberlain at its head. 

Sher All protested, declaring that the Russians had not come by his 
good-will. Nevertheless the mission was despatched, but was turned back 
on the Afghan boundary. The result was inevitably an ultimatum demand- 
ing the acceptance of a permanent mission. The demand was ignored, 
and Lord Lytton proceeded to invade Afghanistan. Only one of the three 
invading columns, that commanded by Sir Frederick Roberts, had any hard 
fighting to do. Sher Ali recognised the futility of resistance ; the Russians, 
who had no intention whatever of helping him, departed from Kabul, and 
he himself fled, to die very shortly afterwards, leaving the Kabul govern- 
ment in the hands of his son Yakub Khan. Yakub accepted a treaty. A 



DEMOCRACY 907 

u scientific frontier," that is, the military control of the passes, was ceded, and 
a British Resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was accepted. In July (1879) he 
arrived at Kabul with a small escort. The third column under Sir Donald 
Stewart, of which the objective had been Kandahar, where it was now 
stationed, was to remain there till the cold weather. The rest of the British 
troops were withdrawn. 

Then the old story was repeated — up to a certain point. There was a 
rising in Kabul ; the Resident and his escort were cut to pieces after a 
gallant defence. But within four 
weeks of the massacre Roberts, 
with a force of six thousand men, 
was back within fifty miles of the 
capital. Ten days later he had 
entered it. Yakub Khan, who, 
with questionable truth, declared 
his own entire innocence of the 
recent outrage, was permitted to 
resign ; and the temporary ad- 
ministration was placed in the 
hands of Roberts. 

This was at the end of October ; 
but by December it had become 
clear enough that Roberts with 
his small force could do nothing 
more than remain on the defensive 
in his position at Sherpur. Here, 
however, a prolonged attack was 
finally and decisively repulsed at 
the end of the year, and Roberts 
was master of the Kabul district. 

In the spring (1880) Stewart to a considerable extent cleared the country 
by his march up from Kandahar to Kabul, in the course of which" there 
was one exceedingly hot but brief engagement at Ahmed Khel. 

From this time policy was dictated by the newly inaugurated Gladstone 
Government ; Lytton was recalled, and his place was taken by Lord Ripon. 
The intention was to revert to the Lawrence policy. The restoration of 
Yakub Khan was impossible, as also was the recognition of his brother 
Ayub at Herat. The Amir chosen -was one of the claimants whom Sher 
Ali had succeeded in expelling, Abdur Rahman. But Kandahar was to be 
retained by the British under British control with another Afghan governor, 
a second Sher Ali. Between Abdur Rahman at Kabul, Yakub at Herat, 
and this Sher Ali at Kandahar, the preservation of peace was most im- 
probable. Yakub opened the attack by marching from Herat towards 
-Kandahar, raising the tribes as he went ; Sher Ali's troops mutinied, and a 
part of the small British force which had been left at Kandahar, marching 




Sir Frederick (Lord) Roberts in 1880. 
[From a photograph.] 



908 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

out to face Yakub, met with a disaster at Maiwand. Kandahar was rapidly 
placed in a state of defence, and Stewart and Roberts at Kabul resolved 
that the latter should at once march to the relief of Kandahar with a force 
of ten thousand men. Speed was essential. For three weeks Roberts 
vanished into the unknown. At the end of three weeks he had successfully 
accomplished his march of three hundred miles, entered Kandahar, and on 
September ist entirely shattered Ayub's forces. 

Again there was a modification of the political programme. The 
Government was convinced that the sound principle for dealing with 
Afghanistan was that which had been ultimately adopted towards Dost 
Mohammed. The Amir was to be left to establish his own authority. 
He was not to have a Resident forced upon him, but he was to be pledged 
to have no diplomatic relations with any foreign Power, while the British 
were pledged to defend him against aggressive action. The retention of 
the ceded frontier outposts was a necessity, but it was decided that the 
occupation of Kandahar would involve more risk than benefit, since the 
way to it from India was secured by the occupation of Quetta at the head 
of the Bolan Pass on the Baluchistan frontier. The retirement from 
Kandahar was strongly disapproved by military advocates of the forward 
policy, but it may be said that the best military opinion was divided on the 
question. The evacuation of Afghanistan was completed early in 1881, 
and Abdur Rahman proved himself entirely capable of establishing his own 
authority. Also he was shrewd enough to distrust Russia more than the 
British. On the whole, it may be claimed that the policy of evacuation, 
in spite of the risks involved, was justified by the event. 



V 

SOUTH AFRICA 

Events in the distant regions of the Empire are apt to escape much 
public attention at home unless they happen to involve military operations. 
This was the case with South Africa until the outbreak of the Zulu War 
during Lord Beaconsfield's administration. Nevertheless, events of grave 
import had taken place at an earlier date. 

We have seen that, by the direct action of the British Government 
during the fifties, two Boer republics had been recognised on the west 
of the Drakensberg mountains, the Orange Free State between the Orange 
River and the Vaal, and the South African or Transvaal Republic beyond the 
Vaal. The ill-defined boundaries on the west of these two states left open 
a line of expansion northward from Cape Colony which was, for the time 
being, ignored. Some years later, however, the discovery of diamond 
mines changed the situation. The lands were claimed by a Griqua or 
semi- Hottentot chief, but also by the two Boer states. An arbitration on 



DEMOCRACY 909 

the question decided in favour of the Griqua, from whom they were 
purchased by the British Government in 187 1. When it was subsequently 
proved that the award had been wrong, the Government declared that, as 
the paramount and responsible power in South Africa, it could not 
surrender the diamond fields to the Free State, to which it gave not over 
generous compensation in cash. The westward expansion of the Boer 
states was blocked, and the way to the interior was held open to the 
British. 

The Orange Free State under President Brand was a model of orderly 
and progressive government. The same thing could not be said of the 
community beyond the Vaal, where there was no firm central administration. 
There were troubles with the neighbouring Bantu tribes, and behind those 
tribes on the south-east lay the highly organised military state of the Zulus, 
under their exceedingly vigorous monarch, Cetewayo. The exchequer of 
the South African Republic was exhausted, and there appeared to be a very 
serious danger of a collision with the Zulus, in which there was a painful 
presumption that the Boers would be wiped out. The wiping out of the 
Boers was likely to be followed by a huge general rising of the black races 
against the white. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a commissioner sent up from 
Natal to investigate the position, came to the conclusion that there was 
only one way of averting the danger — the annexation of the South African 
Republic, and the termination by British rule of the anarchy there pre- 
vailing. There were by this time considerable numbers of British and 
German settlers in the Transvaal district who were in favour of the annexa- 
tion, and Shepstone persuaded himself that only a minority of the white 
population was opposed to it. Consequently in April 1877 the annexation 
of the Transvaal was proclaimed. 

Lord Beaconsfield's Colonial Secretary at this time was Lord Carnarvon, 
the pioneer of the conception of a federation of South Africa on Canadian 
lines. South Africa, as a matter of fact, was not at this time ripe for the 
development of that conception, but it was with this aim in view that Sir 
Bartle Frere, an Indian official of great experience and ability, was at this 
moment appointed Governor of Cape Colony and High Commissioner for 
South Africa. The annexation of the Transvaal was not his doing ; it 
merely fell to him in the course of official routine to confirm Shepstone's 
action. A much more pressing question was the exceedingly menacing 
conduct of Cetewayo. 

The Zulu state was organised with a single eye to military effectiveness. 
Between the death of Dingan some thirty years earlier and the accession of 
Cetewayo in 1873, Zululand had remained comparatively quiet ; but now 
it had become evident that the Zulu king was contemplating a revival of 
the military glories of his earlier predecessors. The protests of the British 
Government against his revival of certain sanguinary practices were 
answered with something perilously like defiance. To Frere it appeared 
imperative that the principles applied in the government of India, where 



9 io THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

most of his experience had lain, must be applied also in Africa. He pro- 
posed to place a Resident in Zululand who should discharge the functions 
of the Residents at the courts of the native princes in India, and should 
impose limits on the barbarism of the Zulu government. This, with other 
demands, was formulated in an ultimatum delivered to Cetewayo in 
December 1878. In plain terms, Frere was convinced that, unless the 
Zulu military organisation were broken up, there would be a war sooner 
or later which might very well assume terrific proportions. Cetewayo 
would certainly yield to nothing short of a convincing display of force. 
At whatever risk there must be no symptom of a hesitation which could 

be construed as a sign of conscious weakness. 

Carnarvon was now no longer at the Colonial 
Office, and the home Government, with its eyes 
fixed upon Afghanistan, could not be induced to 
realise the gravity of the situation. Cetewayo 
ignored the ultimatum. Under the general direc- 
tion of the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Chelmsford, 
three British columns entered Zululand, the move- 
ments beginning in the second week of January 
1879, when the date fixed by the ultimatum had 
passed. The advance of two of the columns was 
stopped by the news of a great disaster to the 
third column under Lord Chelmsford himself. A 
portion of his force was encamped at Isandlwana, 
while the Commander-in-Chief advanced with the 
military post at some distance. But the Zulus 
The 900 men left in camp at Isandlwana became 
suddenly aware that they were being enveloped by a force of 20,000 
Zulus. In the desperate struggle which ensued the British camp was 
wiped out, though in some degree the blow was counterbalanced by the 
magnificent defence of Rorke's Drift at the passage of the Buffalo River, 
where a handful of men had been left to keep the communications with 
Natal open. 

The advance into Zululand was paralysed. It was not till April, three 
months after Isandlwana, that the arrival of reinforcements enabled Lord 
Chelmsford again to take the offensive. The issue then could hardly be 
in doubt, and the Zulu army was completely shattered at the battle of 
Ulundi in July. Cetewayo became a fugitive ; his hiding-place was 
subsequently betrayed and he himself was deported to Cape Colony. Lord 
Wolseley, who had arrived to supersede Lord Chelmsford, was left with the 
task of providing a system of government for Zululand, which was divided 
into districts, still under a dozen native chiefs with a single British 
Resident exercising a general control. The system, however, did not work 
satisfactorily, and Zululand was actually annexed in 1887. 

The affairs in South Africa and in Afghanistan were very serious blows 




Cetewayo. 

rest to attack a Zulu 
were not waiting there. 



DEMOCRACY 911 

to the Beaconsfield administration at home. But the destruction of the 
Zulu power had destroyed also the principal justification for the recent 
annexation of the Transvaal. While the Zulu menace was present, it 
would have been vain for the Boers to attempt any active protest. But 
the Dutch dislike to the British domination was as strong as ever, and 
when there was nothing more to be feared from the Zulus it bore fruit. 



VI 

THE EIGHTY PARLIAMENT 

The new Gladstone administration rested at the outset mainly upon 
what was called the Whig element ; its most prominent members were 
Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and the Duke of Argyle. There were 
members of the extreme Radical wing who had strong claims to office, but 
the avowed or suspected republicanism of such men as Sir Charles Dilke 
and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain made it difficult to find a place for them in 
the ministry. Sir Charles withdrew his own claims in favour of the 
member for Birmingham, who was for some time regarded by the Opposi- 
tion, or at least by their organs in the Press, as the scarcely veiled influence 
which was hurrying the Prime Minister along the paths of destruction. In 
later years he was destined to assume a curiously different character in 
their eyes. 

For four years domestic interests and domestic legislation were almost 
confined to Irish questions. Outside these islands public attention was 
engaged for the first eighteen months upon Afghanistan and South Africa, 
while from the summer of 1882 Egyptian affairs became absorbing, 
almost at the moment when Irish affairs had reached a startling climax. 
How the Afghan affair was settled we have already narrated, but we have 
only hinted at the next scene in the South African drama. 

The burghers, as the citizens of the Transvaal called themselves, expected 
that a Liberal Government would be prompt to reverse the annexation 
carried out by its predecessors, and to restore the independence which a 
previous Liberal Government had granted without any reluctance. They 
were disappointed by emphatic pronouncements that there was to be no 
reversal of policy. Before the end of the year the Government was in fact 
reconsidering the question ; but this was not known to the burghers. 
Shepstone had been mistaken in his belief that the majority of the white 
men had been in favour of his action ; the majority resented the annexation, 
and when they understood that it was definitive they preferred defiance to 
submission. In December, on the anniversary of their great victory over 
the Zulu king Dingan, they proclaimed the Republic and successfully 
"attacked two small British detachments at Potchefstroom and Bronkhorst 
Spruit. While Sir Hercules Robinson at the Cape was endeavouring to 



912 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

obtain a solution of the dispute through the mediation of President Brand 
of the Orange Free State, Sir George Colley, who had taken Sir Garnet 
Wolseley's place, advanced to the Transvaal border with a British column 
to suppress what was unquestionably in a technical sense the rebellion of 
the burghers. On January 28th, 188 1, he met with a reverse at Laing's Nek, 
and a month later his force was routed by a handful of the farmers at 
Majuba Hill, where he himself fell. 

Before this event the home Government had made up its mind that the 
annexation had been a blunder, not, as represented by Shepstone, in accord- 
ance with the will of the people of the Transvaal. Retrocession was re- 
solved upon and despatches to that effect had reached South Africa. On 
the face of it, it appeared that the disaster at Majuba made another change 
of front imperative. The authority and power of the Empire must be 




The Monument at Paardekraal, Krugersdorp, where the Boers proclaimed the independence of 

the Transvaal in 1880. 



vindicated before any concession could be made. Nevertheless, the Govern- 
ment resolved to set aside expediency in favour of the most elevated ethical 
principles. On these principles the burghers ought not to be penalised for 
their success in fighting for a cause which the Cabinet had already recognised 
as a just one. What would have been granted without their victory at 
Majuba should not be denied them because of that victory. Hostilities 
were suspended, and teems for the retrocession of the Transvaal were 
arranged. 

The Republic was to be reinstated, endowed with complete self-govern- 
ment within a territory of which the boundaries were definitely delimited. 
The suzerainty of Great Britain was to be recognised, which precluded the 
Boer government from making treaties on their own account, and a British 
Resident was to be established at the capital, Pretoria. Two years later it 
must be remarked the arrangement was modified by a new " Convention 
of London," under which the Resident was withdrawn, and it became a 



DEMOCRACY 913 

disputable question whether the British could thereafter legally claim any 
control over anything except the foreign relations of the Transvaal Republic. 
It was not perhaps surprising that the lofty morality by which the Govern- 
ment claimed to have been guided was not recognised either by the Opposi- 
tion in England, the bulk of the Transvaal Boers themselves, or a large 
proportion of the white population of South Africa. The magnanimity of 
the mighty power which abstained from demonstrating its overwhelming 
strength was regarded as mere pusillanimity and weakness, at the best 
dictated by a paltry economy ; out of which conviction a brood of troubles 
was to be born in the future. 

Gladstone assumed office in 1880 under the belief that Ireland was 
pacified by what he had done before, and by the expectation of what he 
would do in the future. It was immediately announced that the Peace 




g&asaaasfrhaifc 



Majuba Hill. 



Preservation Act would not be renewed. The Irish members, led by 
Parnell, clamoured for an immediate extension of remedial measures, while 
the Opposition clamoured against the withdrawal of the exceptional powers 
of the Executive. The Government introduced two bills, one a measure 
for the relief of distress, the other to provide compensation for evictions 
following upon the non-payment of rent, where the failure had been due to 
a bona fide inability to pay. In the Lords this bill was mercilessly criticised 
and decisively rejected. At the same time the Peace Preservation Act 
ceased to operate. Immediately there broke out a fresh crop of agrarian 
outrages, and the new weapon was brought into action which has taken its 
name from its first victim, Captain Boycott. 

In the face of this new departure, commonly attributed to the influence 
of- the Land League, it was impossible to rely merely upon the ordinary 
law. A fresh coercion bill was brought in by the Chief Secretary for 

3 m 



914 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Ireland, W. E. Forster, the parent of the Education Act of 1870. It was 
passed after fierce and stormy opposition by the Irish members, but was 
followed by a new Land Bill of which the primary purpose was to secure 
fair rents. A new principle was introduced. Land courts were to be 
established for the assessment of fair rents on the application of tenants 
or of landlords and tenants acting in concert. The Irish members de- 
nounced the bill as wholly inefficient, the Opposition denounced it as a 
flagrant invasion of the rights of property, and the Duke of Argyle retired 
from the ministry which had repudiated the principle of freedom of con- 
tract. The bill was greatly mutilated in the House of Lords, and a dead- 
lock was only averted by a compromise which 
satisfied no one. 

Some months earlier Gladstone's great anta- 
gonist had passed away. His strange and mysteri- 
ous personality had fascinated first his party and 
then the country in spite of themselves, and the 
most audacious innovator among modern British 
statesmen was conceived as the ideal Conservative. 
He was a brilliant statesman who had inspired the 
nation with a new spirit of imperialism, a diploma- 
tist who had triumphantly vindicated the position 
of the country in the councils of Europe, a parlia- 
mentarian who had fought his way to an unqualified 
leadership against apparently overwhelming odds. 
But he was a singular person to have been selected 
as the great representative of Conservatism, a title which was absolutely 
appropriate to his successor in the leadership of the party, Lord Salisbury. 

The Parnellites made no pretence of being satisfied with the Land Bill; 
outrages continued ; and since English opinion held that Parnell and 
the Land League were responsible for them, several of the Irish leaders 
were arrested and imprisoned at Kilmainham. They replied by issuing a 
manifesto calling upon the tenants to pay no rent until they were released. 
The response was the condemnation and suppression of the Land League 
as an illegal organisation, though, according to the unfailing rule, it was 
presently revived under a new name. 

In the spring of 1882 the Peers, on a resolution of Lord Salisbury, 
appointed a committee to enquire into the working of the Land Act. 
Gladstone replied by a resolution in the Commons virtually censuring the 
action of the House of Lords. Neither resolution could have any imme- 
diate material effect ; but that of Lord Salisbury marked a definite 
political purpose on the part of the great Conservative leader. Unlike Lord 
Beaconsfield, Salisbury, who as Lord Cranborne had withdrawn from the 
last Derby administration on account of the Reform Bill, feared the new 
democracy and the power of the democratic House of Commons, and hoped 
to use the House of Lords as a counterpoise. It may be said that the 




C. S. Parnell. 
[From a photograph.] 






DEMOCRACY 915 

increased activity of the House of Lords was initiated by their treatment 
of the Irish Compensation Bill in the previous year, but it was Lord 
Salisbury who systematically developed the policy. 

Immediately after this, the Irish leaders were released from Kilmainham 
and Forster resigned the Irish Secretaryship. There was undoubtedly an 
understanding that they would use their influence to stop outrages, which 
was developed in the mind of the Opposition into a corrupt compact for 
their support of the Liberal Government in parliament ; and the whole 
transaction was vehemently stigmatised as the " Kilmainham Treaty." 
But it is equally certain that the Parnellites were 
not conspicuously transformed into allies of the 
Liberals. 

The leaders had hardly been released when 
Lord Frederick Cavendish, who succeeded Forster 
as Irish Secretary, was assassinated in the Phoenix 
Park in Dublin. Consequently a bill promised for 
the relief of tenants whose rent was in arrear was 
preceded by a very stringent " Prevention of 
Crimes " Bill to be enforced for three years, 
giving to the Irish Executive abnormal powers 
of search, arrest, and summary jurisdiction. The 
murder in Phoenix Park to some extent silenced 
the Irish leaders ; but in spite of the Crimes 
Bill there was no cessation of the outrages and 
murders, and the new organisation called the National League, avowedly 
political as well as agrarian, took the place of the suppressed Land League. 

Two months after the Phoenix Park murder England was awakened to 
the existence of complications in another region by the bombardment of 
Alexandria. During the last decade the debts of the Khedive of Egypt, 
Ismail, had compelled him to subject the Egyptian finances to the joint 
control of British and French. As a practical consequence the dual 
control was inevitably extended to the Egyptian administration. A 
nationalist group in Egypt was consequently formed, which aimed at 
overthrowing the European ascendency through the instrumentality of the 
Egyptian army controlled by Arabi Pasha. The group dominated the 
Khedive Tewfik, Ismail's successor, and captured the ministry. Counter- 
pressure from Britain and France aggravated the antagonism, and Arabi with 
the army assumed an attitude so aggressive that the British Admiral Seymour, 
after inviting the co-operation of the French, which was refused, considered it 
necessary to open a bombardment and then to occupy Alexandria. But 
while Arabi remained in arms nothing more could be done. An expedition 
was despatched to suppress him, and in September his forces were shattered 
by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Arabi was taken 
prisoner and Cairo was occupied. 1 




Arabi Pasha. 



1 For map of Egypt and the Sudan, see page 942. 



9 i6 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

The British action had destroyed not only the army but the whole 
system of Egyptian government. Except perhaps in France it was gener- 
ally recognised that this action had been fully justified. France, by refusing 
to co-operate, had put herself out of court, and there was no escaping the 
necessity that Britain should on her own account reorganise the shattered 
government. Annexation would have been warranted ; a protectorate 
would have been warranted ; but the British Government wanted neither, 

and chose instead to claim a complete 
immediate control of affairs, in the illusory 
expectation that it would be merely tem- 
porary. The Khedive's government was 
restored, but Lord Cromer — at that time 
Major Evelyn Baring — was appointed 
Agent and Consul-General, which meant 
in effect Dictator, and a British controller 
was appointed over each department of 
state — Finance, Public Works, Judiciary, 
and Army. 

The work of reorganisation went on 
steadily and efficiently. But far to the 
south in the Egyptian Sudan there arose 
in 1883 a fanatic calling himself the 
Mahdi, the appointed successor of Moham- 
med, who gathered to his standard the 
wild Mohammedan tribes of the interior. 
The British refused to attempt bringing 
the interior under control ; the organisa- 
\ tion of efficient government in Egypt 
proper was work enough. But the 
Egyptian government despatched an ex- 
pedition under an English officer, Hicks 
Pasha, to overthrow the Mahdi, and the expedition was annihilated instead. 
The British insisted that the Sudan must be left to take care of itself 
and that the garrisons there must be withdrawn. The withdrawal of the 
garrisons was a task of extreme difficulty. To carry it out the British 
Government appointed the one man who might be able to accomplish it suc- 
cessfully, General Charles George Gordon. Gordon, a Puritan and a mystic, 
was one of those men who seemed to accomplish impossible ends by methods 
impossible to any one else. The one way of dealing with such a man is to 
accept the whole enormous risk of leaving him an absolutely free hand. 
Gordon went to the Sudan knowing that he had not an absolutely free 
hand ; that he would be supported up to a certain point, but not beyond. 
When he got to the Sudan he acted on the assumption that he would be 
supported at all costs, and proceeded to carry out plans which to the 
authorities appeared to be madness. They refused the support which he 




Osman Digna, leader of the Mahdi's forces 

[From a photograph.] 



DEMOCRACY 917 

demanded. The result was that in March 1884 he found himself shut 
up in Khartum, although a threatened invasion of Egypt proper by the 
Mahdi was broken by a force under General Graham at El-teb. 

But it was not possible to leave Gordon to his fate at Khartum, 
although it had been definitely understood that no military expedition was 
to be sent to the Sudan. An expedition to rescue Gordon was necessary. 
Yet the home authorities failed to realise the urgency of the situation. 
Valuable time was lost over differences as to the form which the expedition 
should take. It was not till September, when Gordon had already been 
locked up for six months, that Lord Wolseley sailed for Egypt. Then the 
arrangements for an advance up the Nile 
were proceeded with vigorously. Even until 
the last moment it was believed that the relief 
would be effected. But in fact Khartum 
was hardly defensible. When the Mahdi 
appreciated that the British force was actually 
close at hand he rushed the place, and 
Gordon was killed two days before the 
arrival of the British on January 28th. So 
perished the heroic soldier whose marvellous 
personality had at last, at the very end of 
his career, suddenly impressed the imagina- 
tions of the British people with an enthusi- 
astic admiration rarely paralleled. His death 
dealt an irremediable blow to the Govern- 
ment whose blundering failure to rescue 
him was felt as a shameful betrayal. But 
there was nothing more to be done. The 
re-conquest of the Sudan was not to be thought of. 
back. Years of patient and persistent organisation were needed before 
the times were ripe for a conquering advance upon Khartum. 

In the years between 188 1 and 1884, during the period of the Egyptian 
troubles, attention was temporarily attracted to India by a somewhat ill- 
advised attempt on the part of the Viceroy Lord Ripon to carry out an 
administrative reform extending the jurisdiction of native magistrates over 
European residents. -A storm of indignation was raised amongst the British 
in India, easily understood by any one who grasped the conditions of 
European rule there, but unintelligible on the hypothesis that there is 
no reason for recognising any distinction between the white and the brown 
races. The affair was unfortunate, because although the measure in the 
form in which it was finally promulgated did not give rise to grievances, 
it intensified instead of diminishing the racial antagonism which is always 
latent in the great dependency. In relation to the colonies, the growth, 
in the minds of a few leading men, of a new conception of the united 
British Empire, was marked by the birth of the Federation League ; but 




General Gordon. 
[From a photograph.] 



The expedition fell 



91 8 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the idea had not as yet taken any general hold of the public. While Lord 
Rosebery was a lively advocate of the new movement, the official attitude 
was more nearly akin to that of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, who 
had joined the Liberal ranks ; it seemed to be governed by the assumption 
that separation was the natural and desirable goal to which all colonies 
were tending and should be encouraged to tend. 

At home Ireland continued to be disturbed, and in England a good 
deal of alarm was created by sundry ineffective dynamite outrages originat- 
ing with the extremists among the Irish in America. But there was little 
opportunity for legislation until, in 1884, a bill was introduced for complet- 
ing the democratic system by extending the franchise to the agricultural 
labourer who had still been excluded by the Reform Bill of 1867. Offici- 
ally the Conservatives declared themselves in favour of the franchise extension, 
but it was obvious that the step would necessitate a far-reaching redistribu- 
tion of seats ; and the Conservatives claimed that the two measures should 
be combined. The Government insisted that the Franchise Bill should come 
first, though it was to be followed by a Redistribution Bill. The Franchise 
Bill was carried in the House of Commons ; the House of Lords, under 
Salisbury's leadership, passed a resolution that it should not become law 
except as a part of a complete scheme. This attitude was taken as imply- 
ing an attempt to compel the Government to dissolve, and Liberals angrily 
denounced the claim of the peers to force a dissolution. The bill was 
withdrawn with the announcement that it would be reintroduced in an 
autumn session. There was every prospect of a fierce struggle between 
the Houses. The Government had been losing credit with the country ; 
but a fiery campaign in the summer appeared to revive Liberal enthusiasm, 
and the "mending or ending" of the House of Lords seemed likely to 
become a plank of the Liberal platform. 

Yet the strong element of Conservatism in Gladstone himself, as well 
as in the Whig wing of the party, made him anxious to avoid a constitutional 
crisis of such gravity, while the more cautious among the peers viewed 
the results of such a struggle with grave apprehension. A compromise 
was arrived at between the leaders ; when the autumn session was opened, 
the bill went through the Commons, and it was then announced that 
if it were passed the Redistribution Bill should be brought in forthwith, and 
that in effect the second bill should not be made a party measure but 
should be shaped so far as possible in conformity with Conservative as 
well as Liberal opinion. The second bill was then brought in, the Lords 
passed the Franchise Bill, and the Redistribution Bill went through both 
Houses with the minimum of controversy. The fundamental principles 
of the measure were the disfranchisement of boroughs with a population of 
less than 15,000, and the return of one member only by every constituency 
with only a very few exceptions. 

The Liberals had gained something by the vigorous campaign of the 
summer ; but this was more than compensated by the fall of Khartum ; and 



DEMOCRACY 919 

the Penjdeh incident in Afghanistan in March 1885 probably weakened 
the Government again. There was a collision between Russian and Afghan 
troops on the border of Afghanistan, unmistakably due to the aggressive 
action of the Turcoman commander Ali Khan, whose name has been con- 
veniently Russianised as Alikanoff. For a moment it appeared that there 
would be war between the Amir and the Tsar, and that the British would 
be bound to support the Amir in the most thorough-going fashion. Fortu- 
nately Abdur Rhaman, with a singular shrewdness, refused to make much 
of the incident which was judiciously smoothed over ; and the process of 
delimiting the several frontiers, which had given occasion to it, was con- 
tinued without further serious friction. At the same time there was a 
certain feeling, born of the general suspicion of timidity attaching to the 
Gladstone Government, that sufficient vigour and firmness had not been 
displayed ; though on the merits of the particular case there was hardly 
sufficient warrant for that view. 

The weakened Government was defeated on the Budget. Gladstone 
resigned, and Lord Salisbury took office. Divergencies in the ministry as 
to the treatment of Ireland had contributed to its fall. But the Con- 
servatives, in an actual minority, were not inclined to throw down a direct 
challenge to the Irish members. They did not find it necessary to renew 
the Crimes Act, and they brought in a generous measure, known as Lord 
Ashbourne's Act, for the provision of public funds to facilitate the purchase 
of their holdings by the Irish tenantry. Coming from the Conservative 
Government the measure received no active opposition. In the circum- 
stances however a dissolution was inevitable, and the results of the general 
election in August were unexpected. Gladstone had rejected certain over- 
tures from Parnell, declaring that a definite Irish policy could not be laid 
down until Irish opinion had been clearly expressed by the now enlarged 
electorate. The answer as far as Ireland was concerned was emphatic. 
No Liberals were returned for that country, but there were eighty-five 
Home Rulers. The Liberals in the House of Commons numbered precisely 
one-half of that assembly, and it was obvious that the Parnellites were in 
a position to paralyse any government whatever. Lord Salisbury had no 
disposition to attempt carrying on government by Parnellite aid. When 
parliament met in January 1886, it was announced that a new Coercion 
Bill would be brought in. Ministers were defeated on an amendment 
to the address, Lord Salisbury resigned, and the queen sent once more 
for Gladstone. 



CHAPTER XXXVII 

LORD SALISBURY 

I 

THE HOME RULE STRUGGLE 

The brief Gladstone administration of 1886 may be taken as marking the 
moment after which it becomes no longer possible to view party politics 
with the impersonal detachment proper to a historian. From that date 
one of the two great political parties has been definitely committed to the 
doctrine that Ireland ought to have a separate legislature of her own to 
deal with Irish affairs. To the other party that doctrine has seemed to be 
fraught with such danger to imperial unity that resistance to it must be 
the paramount consideration to which all other questions must give way. 
Whatever other complications there may be, whether Liberal leaders have 
actually made Home Rule a definite part of their programme or not, they 
have always affirmed their adherence to the doctrine. Only at one general 
election has the party received substantial support from Unionists, because 
on that one occasion it was clearly understood that they would not intro- 
duce a bill for Home Rule. The Gladstone administration introduced a 
new line of cleavage which has continued until the present year, 19 12, 
when a Home Rule Bill is before parliament. If that bill becomes law 
that line of cleavage will disappear, and it appears almost certain that 
economic policy will take its place, as it did in the case of the one general 
election referred to, that at the close of 1905. 

When, in February 1886, Mr. Gladstone undertook to form a Cabinet 
on the defeat and resignation of the Salisbury Government, it immediately 
became clear that he intended to introduce a measure of Home Rule. 
Hitherto the overwhelming majority of Liberals as well as of Conservatives 
had regarded the idea of establishing a parliament at Dublin as entirely 
outside the sphere of practical politics. Advanced Radicals had indeed 
been suspected of leanings in that direction ; but their minds were very 
much more set upon democratic reforms in England, while the Whig wing 
at least had absolutely no sympathy with the Irish demand. Mr. Gladstone 
succeeded in carrying the bulk of his party with him, but some of the most 
prominent of his former colleagues refused to join the Cabinet or left it as 
soon as his proposals were formulated, and formed a separate Liberal 

Unionist party in parliament. This group included on the one side Whigs 

920 



LORD SALISBURY 921 

such as Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen, and On the other the personal 
followers of the then recognised champion of Radicalism, Mr. Joseph 
Chamberlain. 

The features of the new policy were presented in two measures, a 
Home Rule Bill and a Land Bill. The purpose of the first was to provide 
Ireland with a legislature of her own for the control of Irish affairs. While 
to the bulk of the Unionists, Conservative or Liberal, any conceivable 
scheme of Home Rule would have been obnoxious, opposition concentrated 
upon the point that Ireland was to cease altogether to be represented at 
Westminster. While the tactics of Parnell seemed to make the exclusion 
of Irish members eminently desirable from the point of view of the conduct 
of public business, it carried with it the separation of Ireland from all interest 
in imperial concerns, and it was therefore denounced as being emphatically 
separatist in its effects — an encouragement, that is, to the Irish people to 
sever theh\ slender surviving link with the Empire. The Land Bill was 
opposed no less heartily. The intention was to remove the land question 
from the scope of action of the proposed Irish parliament by a huge scheme 
of land purchase on the part of the British Government which would have 
established a peasant proprietary. The real intensity of the opposition to 
the whole scheme lay in the rooted belief that the leaders of the Irish 
people were separatists who would merely use the new machine as an 
instrument for breaking down the British connection altogether, coupled 
with the anticipation that " Home Rule means Rome Rule." The Home 
Rule Bill was defeated on its second reading. 

Mr. Gladstone appealed to the country ; the Conservatives did not 
contest the seats of Liberal Unionist candidates ; seventy-eight members of 
that party were returned ; and the Conservatives outnumbered the British 
and Irish Home Rulers together by thirty-five. Mr. Gladstone resigned, 
and Lord Salisbury took office with an administration formed entirely from 
the Conservative party, since his own proposal for a Coalition Government 
with Lord Hartington at its head was rejected by the Liberal Unionist 
leader. 

The measures for Ireland had effected little towards the relief of agri- 
cultural distress. Tenants were in arrears with their rent, and evictions 
multiplied. Mr. Parnell introduced a Tenants' Relief Bill, which, among 
its provisions, authorised the land courts to stay evictions if half the rent 
was paid. The bill was thrown out and the Irish leaders instituted the in- 
genious device known as the Plan of Campaign. The tenants were to com- 
bine and offer the landlords a fair rent, or what they considered a fair one. 
If the landlords refused it the tenants were to pay over that fair rent not 
to the landlords but to a committee charged with carrying on the struggle. 
When parliament reassembled at the beginning of 1887 new rules of pro- 
cedure were adopted in the House for the repression of obstructive tactics. 
The application of the " closure " and its subsequent developments were in- 
variably condemned by the Opposition of the day as shameless interference 



922 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

with the right of free speech, and were defended by the Government of the 
day as necessitated by the gross abuse of free discussion by the Opposition. 
After settling procedure the Government went on to introduce a new 
Crimes Bill for Ireland, conferring upon the Lord Lieutenant new powers of 
condemning leagues or combinations as illegal, and of proclaiming dis- 
turbed districts, which were thereupon subjected to a practically arbitrary 
government. The long and angry debates were brought to an abrupt 




Mr. A. J. Balfour. 
[An early portrait by Lafayette, Dublin.] 

conclusion by the application of the closure. The Act, however, was ac- 
companied by a new Land Bill, in which the most important concessions 
gave some facilities for a revision of rents, and authorised the county 
courts to grant time for the payment of arrears. The bill was considerably 
modified in favour of the tenants, at the instance of the Liberal Unionists. 
Still Ireland continued to be the scene of violent disorders, of constant 
collisions between the peasantry and the police, who were employed to 
assist at evictions or to suppress illegal meetings, and of much excitement 



LORD SALISBURY 923 

over the arrests of leaders who encouraged the populace to defy the 
" tyranny " of the law. The language of partisanship was at this time 
peculiarly acrimonious, and was perhaps made the more so by the placid 
persistence with which the Chief Secretary, Mr. Arthur Balfour, treated 
offenders in Ireland precisely as if they had been ordinary law-breakers, 
while he remained calmly impervious to the most virulent personal attacks. 

In the course of a controversy so bitter as was then raging no accusa- 
tions were too gross to be readily believed. An exceedingly comprehensive 
attack upon the Land League in general, upon all the Irish leaders, and 
most uncompromisingly upon Mr. Parnell, in the Times newspaper, led to 
one of the Irish members bringing a libel action against that paper. The 
action failed on the ground that Mr. O'Donnell, the plaintiff, had not been 
singled out ; but the republication in evidence of certain letters purporting 
to have been written by the Irish leader roused Mr. Parnell to action. He 
repeated his previous contemptuous condemnation of the incriminating 
documents as forgeries, and he demanded the appointment of a select 
committee of enquiry upon the specific question of the letters. The 
Government rejected his demand, but they passed an Act to appoint a 
commission virtually to investigate all the charges which had been publicly 
brought against the Land League and the Irish leaders in general. In 
effect sixty-five prominent Irish leaders were put on their trial on a series 
of definitely formulated charges. 

The Parnell Commission, as it is always called, met in September 1888. 
Hitherto it may be said that almost the entire British public, whatever its 
political creed, had no doubt whatever that the Parnellites had habitually 
incited resistance to the government, that they had been enabled to carry 
on their operations by means of financial assistance from the American 
Irish, that they had not repudiated connection with the most extreme 
section of that body, and that they had rather encouraged than attempted 
to restrain agrarian crime. When, after a year had passed, the report of 
the judges confirmed these ideas, but with distinct modifications in favour 
of the Irish members, some of whom were proved to have actively en- 
deavoured to check outrages, the verdict was taken by most Unionists to 
be a decisive condemnation of the Home Rule movement, and by most of 
the other party to prove that the most serious objection to Home Rule was 
less serious than they' had previously supposed. But, as a matter of fact, 
public interest in the trial was only in a very minor degree concerned 
with the political question at issue ; it was almost confined to the personal 
charges against individuals, and, above all, Mr. Parnell. The worst of those 
charges rested upon the evidence of letters, and, most conspicuously of all, 
one particular letter which, if genuine, would have proved Mr. Parnell's 
, condonation of the Phoenix Park murder. But when it was proved in the 
course of the trial that this letter with others had quite certainly been 
forged and sold to the Times by a man named Pigott, there was a strong 
revulsion of public sentiment. The Times had permitted itself to be deceived 



924 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

quite honestly ; but it would never have done so if the virulence of political 
feeling had not made it incapable of testing evidence. The recklessness 
with which the forgery had been accepted recoiled upon the heads of Mr. 
Parnell's accusers at large, and from that time there was no longer the old 
readiness to assume as a matter of course the worst possible interpretation 
of everything said or done by any Irish member. Mr. Parnell almost became 
popular. 

Yet in the year following, 1890, the Irish parliamentary party suffered 
a grievous blow from a scandal in which the leader was the most prominent 
figure. The Nonconformist conscience came into play, and the Irish party 
was split between those who stood by their old chief and those who declared 
that he could no longer be parliamentary leader. His death shortly after- 
wards did not for a long time suffice to heal the animosities which had 
arisen in this connection, and the affair went far to paralyse the activities 
of the disunited Irish parliamentary party. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Balfour's drastic application of the Crimes Act in Ireland 
was accompanied not unsuccessfully by further remedial measures, an ex- 
tension of Lord Ashbourne's Land Purchase Act, the reclamation of waste 
lands, and the development of light railways. By 189 1 the Government 
found itself in a position not only to introduce still another Land Purchase 
Act, but at the same time to suspend the Crimes Act over almost the whole 
country. In the next year, however, a general election gave the Gladstonian 
Liberals in conjunction with eighty Irish Nationalists a majority of forty in 
the House of Commons ; the defeat of the Government was followed by 
Lord Salisbury's resignation, and Mr. Gladst&sejormed his last adminis- 
tration. *~"™\ 

Again the old leader returned to the one object wijich he had now set 
before himself, and introduced a new Home Rule Bill. The fundamental 
difference between this bill and its predecessor was that W Irisn members 
were to be retained at Westminster, but with their numbers reduced to 
eighty. The proposal which it had first embodied for limiting the subjects 
on which they might vote was subsequently dropped. The bill wa s fought 
stubbornly line by line, and was ultimately forced through the House of 
Commons by the use of the closure, now vehemently denounce^ bv * ts 
original authors. But the House of Lords declined to recognise tnat the 
authority by which the bill had been carried was that of the nation. They 
rejected the bill. Very shortly afterwards Mr. Gladstone, who w; as now 
eighty-four years of age, retired, and was succeeded in the leaders m P by 
Lord Rosebery. When, in 1895, the Government resigned, when de feated 
by a snap vote on a side issue, the electorate at the general election x vm( v 
immediately followed emphatically endorsed the action of the Hous? 13 ^ 
Lords by returning the combined Conservatives and Liberal Unionists w* s * ^° ) 
a majority exceeding one hundred and fifty. Not for seventeen years w* 1 ^ 
another Home Rule Bill to be introduced in parliament. 



. 



LORD SALISBURY 



925 



II 



LORD SALISBURY AND THE UNIONISTS 



Though Irish affairs were exceedingly prominent during the ten years 
which followed the last extension of the franchise, they did not occupy 
public attention exclusively. 
Although the Liberal Unionists 
refused to take direct part in 
the administration after the fall 
of the first Gladstone ministry 
the Salisbury Government was 
dependent upon their support. 
Few as they were a very large 
proportion of them were men 
of ability and weight, respected 
on both sides of the House, 
though the most brilliant of 
their number was more feared 
than respected by his political 
opponents. Some consider- 
able time elapsed before hopes 
of a reconciliation between 
Mr. Chamberlain and his 
former colleagues were en- 
tirely given up, and a reconcilia- 
tion would have jeopardised 
the ministerial majority. Thus 
the Liberal Unionists held a 
strong position, and the Con- 
servatives, willingly or un- 
willingly, found it necessary to 
defer largely to their wishes. 

The position became perhaps more marked when Lord Salisbury's brilliant 
but erratic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill, resigned 
at the end of 1886. Lord Randolph was the champion of what was called 
Tory democracy, the doctrine that it was the business of the Conservatives 
to carry out democratic measures. He resigned in order to force upon 
his colleagues economies which they were not inclined to sanction,, 
believing himself to be indispensable to the Cabinet, since there was no 
member of the Conservative party in the House of Commons to whom the 
office which he held could be assigned with confidence. In this crisis the 
Liberal Unionists came to the rescue of the Government ; Lord Randolph 




Lord Salisbury. 
[From a photograph by Russell & Sons. ] 



926 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

had u forgotten Goschen," who, with the assent of his own party, accepted 
the vacant office, and thereby sealed the adherence of the Whig section to 
the Government. Mr. Chamberlain's section, however, was to a consider- 
able extent in sympathy with Lord Randolph ; his support of the Govern- 
ment became for the moment more dubious, and the efforts for a Liberal 
reconciliation were renewed. They failed completely, since the diver- 
gencies were such as could not be bridged over, and Mr. Chamberlain 
ultimately developed into the most uncompromisingly hostile of Mr. 
Gladstone's opponents. But the necessity for conciliating him until the 
later stage of actual coalition between Conservatives and Liberal Unionists 
was a constant factor in the Conservative legislation. 

This influence made itself felt not only in the Irish Land Bills. In 
1888 the ministers brought in a Local Government Bill, which caused Mr. 
Ritchie, the minister in charge of it, to be dubbed " Ritchie the Radical." 
Hitherto local administration had been very largely in the hands of the 
local justices. The bill established elected county councils on the same 
basis as the elective corporations which controlled local affairs in the 
boroughs, the elected councils themselves electing a number of coadjutors 
known as aldermen. The large areas were further divided up into districts 
with an elective district council. Boroughs with over fifty thousand 
inhabitants were constituted as separate counties, while separate arrange- 
ments were made for the metropolis. 

The Local Government Bill of 1888 and the Free Education Act of 
1 89 1 were the two leading pieces of domestic legislation for which the 
Salisbury Government was responsible. Mr. Forster's Act of 1870 had 
made education compulsory ; that it should be made free was the 
apparently inevitable corollary. The proposal, introduced by a Con- 
servative Government, found comparatively little opposition ; although 
there were not wanting some stout-hearted individualists who denounced 
the measure as destructive of the sense of parental responsibility, declaring 
that free meals would follow free education, and that in the long run the 
state would find itself called upon to make entire provision for the rising 
generation. But when a measure seems generally desirable to both parties 
in the state it is vain to call it Socialistic ; that term in ordinary parlance 
is merely a phrase expressing disapprobation, which is somewhat unfor- 
tunate for persons who prefer the pursuit of accuracy in political termin- 
ology. Free education was in fact a measure typical of the " Socialism " 
which is based upon no abstract theory, but calls for state intervention and 
state action where immediate beneficial results are anticipated from action in 
the particular case. 

The Conservatives then gave free education, and therein they had the 
support of the Opposition. Neither party perhaps realised at the time one 
unfortunate but inevitable result. Hitherto the voluntary schools had com- 
peted on comparatively even terms with the board schools. But if they 
were to provide free education they must have equivalent support from the 



LORD SALISBURY 927 

state. How far was the provision of additional support from the state 
compatible with the preservation of their denominational atmosphere ? 
This question was presently to become acute, and the controversies on the 
subject embittered religious antagonisms, carried them into party warfare, 
and gave sectarian disputes a prominence painfully injurious to the 
efficiency of the educational system. 

Before the close of the administration three other measures were passed 
with the general approval of the Opposition as well as of the Government. 
A modification of the Factory Acts extended the protection of women, and 
raised the age at which the employment of children was permitted. An 
Agricultural Holdings Act enabled county councils to advance three-fourths 
of the money required for the purchase of small holdings, and a Tithes 
Act made the tithe payable by the landlord instead of by the tenant. 
Nothing was thereby affected except the method of collecting the charge. 
Since 18^5 the tenant had paid the tithe, and had paid the landlord his 
rent less the amount of the tithe ; now he paid the landlord the full rent 
and the landlord paid the tithe. But the Nonconformist tenant was relieved 
from the feeling that he was being compelled personally to contribute to 
the maintenance of a Church to which he did not belong, a fiction which 
had been kept in being by the old method. 

When Mr. Gladstone formed his last administration, the new Home 
Rule Bill held the stage until its rejection by the House of Lords. The 
Government, however, declined to admit the right of the House of Lords 
to dictate a dissolution of parliament. They proceeded with the process 
which was called "filling up the cup," introducing measures which the 
Lords amended past recognition. An Employers' Liability Bill made em- 
ployers in certain cases responsible for injuries suffered by their employees, 
and abolished the doctrine of " common employment." The meaning of this 
doctrine was that the employer was not responsible for injuries suffered by 
a workman in consequence of the negligence of a fellow-employee. But 
the bill was made nugatory by an amendment of the Peers, which permitted 
contracting out ; consequently it was withdrawn. A new Local Govern- 
ment Bill establishing parish councils was carried, though at the cost of 
accepting two amendments which appear to have convinced Mr. Gladstone 
that the time was close at hand when the constitutional position of the 
House of Lords would become a question too critical to be deferred. At 
the age of eighty-four, with eyesight and hearing impaired, he felt himself 
no longer fitted to enter upon so grave a contest. The aged statesman 
resigned, and the leadership of the Liberal party passed to Lord Rosebery. 

The new administration which endured for fifteen months, ending in 
June 1895, was signalised by only one domestic measure of first-rate im- 
portance. This was Sir William Harcourt's budget, which provided a 
lucrative source of revenue by the new imposts called the " Death Duties," 
whereby the state appropriated a substantial proportion of property left on 
decease. The principle was old enough, since in feudal times the heir had 



928 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

to pay fees to his feudal superior on entering upon his inheritance ; but it 
remained for Sir William Harcourt to apply it so as to add materially to 
the revenue, though the abstract justice of doing so had long been main- 
tained by theorists. This was the one measure in which the Government 
got its own way, since the Lords considered themselves warranted in re- 
fusing to recognise the composite majority in the Commons as representing 
the national will. The futility of the situation had become obvious ; and 
when Ministers were defeated on a snap vote concerning the supplies of 
ammunition, they took the opportunity of resigning. The Opposition took 
office, at once appealed to the country, and were returned to power with 
an overwhelming majority, which was maintained without being greatly 
impaired for ten years. 

In India the close of 1895 had witnessed a further extension of dominion, 
thoughnot within the limits of the peninsula, by the final annexation of Burmah 
in consequence of the persistently impracticable attitude of the Burmese 
government. Mandelay was occupied in November 1885, and the formal 
annexation was carried out in the following year. Relations with the 
Amir of Kabul continued to be satisfactory, and the completion of the 
delimitation of the Afghan, Russian, and British frontiers removed that 
question from the danger sphere. Perhaps the most important feature of 
the period now under review was the appearance and development within 
the British dominion of the body which named itself the Indian National 
Congress. Representing almost exclusively one particular class, it claimed 
to represent the voice of India. The persistent view of the Indian Govern- 
ment that the National Congress is not representative of real native opinion 
is difficult of acceptance in the British Isles, because it is the only articulate 
voice that comes from the natives of India ; and the action of Government 
has been considerably complicated in consequence. 

Lord Beaconsfield's attitude of emphatic self-assertion on the part of 
the British Empire was not maintained by Lord Salisbury in his relations 
with foreign Powers. On the contrary, it was his guiding principle to 
avoid participation in the complications of European continental politics 
and to attend strictly to British interests. His ascendency over his own 
party was sufficient to enable him to adopt a policy of " graceful conces- 
sions " which would have been extremely difficult for a Liberal Govern- 
ment. Lord Salisbury stood without a rival in his knowledge of foreign 
affairs, and it was not easy to charge the diplomatist who had shared with 
Lord Beaconsfield the honours of the Berlin Treaty with readiness to pay 
an excessive price for peace. In fact at this period the European power 
whose interests were most difficult to reconcile with our own was France, 
and the source of friction lay in Egypt, from which France had been 
ousted by the events leading up to the British occupation. The preser- 
vation of a free hand in the control of Egyptian affairs was of first-rate 
importance, and Lord Salisbury was denounced chiefly by the organs of 
his own party for yielding to the demands both of France and of 



LORD SALISBURY 929 

Germany in other regions, virtually as the price for the free hand in 
Egypt. 

In most cases there was justification for the concessions. The European 
Powers had awakened to the fact that Africa was the only quarter of the 
globe which was not under the dominion of highly organised states, and a 
scramble had set in for the partition of the Dark Continent. The partition 
into spheres of influence was carried out between 1885 and 1892, and it 
was freely declared that Lord Salisbury surrendered to Germany much 
which ought to have been claimed for the British Empire. In the view, 
however, of German expansionists, Germany came very badly out of the 
bargaining. The only plausible ground for condemning the African bargain 
from the British point of view was the failure to obtain complete territorial 
continuity from North to South of the Continent. Canada, however, and 
Newfoundland, had warrant for declaring that their interests were neglected 
by the Imperial Government in the settlement with France of the long- 
standing disputes as the Newfoundland Fishery rights. Canada also was 
ill-pleased over another Fisheries Treaty with the United States. The 
treaty, however, collapsed, because both the great American parties sought 
popularity by denouncing it in view of an approaching presidential election. 
More satisfactory was the settlement through arbitration of a seal-fishery 
quarrel with the United States, which had twenty years before acquired 
Alaska from Russia, and now sought to impose limitations against which 
they had protested vigorously at an earlier stage ; the arbitration was 
decisively in favour of the British claims, although concessions were made 
outside the award of the arbitrators, with the intention only of preventing 
practices which threatened to exterminate the seals altogether. 

But while specific questions were creating some degree of friction 
between mother country and colonies, the conception of imperial unity had 
been gaining ground considerably, and an epoch was marked in the rela- 
tions of the different parts of the Empire when the celebration of Queen 
Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 gave occasion for a conference in London for the 
first time between the chiefs of the imperial government and representa- 
tives of the colonies. There was no premature attempt to bring forward 
schemes of federation, or indeed to formulate schemes at all ; but an 
immense impulse was given to the conception of imperial unity by the 
mere recognition of the fact that the whole Empire has common interests 
and common burdens in which the whole Empire should be consulted, and 
in which the whole Empire should share. Between 1885 and 1895 events 
were taking place in one portion of that Empire which were about to issue 
in startling developments. During the decade Ireland had been the 
absorbing topic ; in the next period the primary interest was to be trans- 
ferred to South Africa. 



3 N 



93° 



THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 



III 



THE STORM CLOUD IN SOUTH AFRICA 



When Lord Salisbury took office for the second time the Liberal 
Unionists no longer declined a coalition. They were powerfully re- 
presented in the new 
Cabinet. Lord Harting- 
ton had some time pre- 
viously succeeded to the 
dukedom of Devonshire, 
and the leadership of the 
party in the Commons 
had passed to Mr. 
Chamberlain, whose 
former militant Radical- 
ism was being rapidly 
^^ merged into an equally 
militant Imperialism, 
which caused his ap- 
pointment to the Colonial 
Office to be hailed with 
satisfaction by all those 
who were inclined to 
condemn the indifferen- 
tism of colonial policy 
in the past. The now 
unqualified alliance of 
Lord Salisbury and the 
Duke of Devonshire in 
the Lords and Mr. Bal- 
four and Mr. Chamber- 
lain in the Commons formed an exceedingly powerful combination, which 
was the more effective as there were dissensions among the Liberal 
leaders and Mr. Gladstone had now completely withdrawn from parlia- 
ment. 

Colonial affairs were no longer to permit of indifferentism. Before the 
ministers met parliament in January 1896 came news from South Africa 
that Dr. Jameson had entered the Transvaal at the head of an armed force, 
and that after a short engagement he and all his men had become the 
prisoners of the Boer government. Since the retrocession in 1881 the 
British public had very nearly forgotten South Africa ; but this unexpected 
incident, coupled with an impassioned war song from the pen of the poet 




Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. 
[From a drawing by W. Hodgson, 18 



LORD SALISBURY 931 

laureate, startled it into a renewed interest which was rapidly intensified as 
the situation developed. 

The retrocession had been followed by the London Convention in 1884, 
which, while unfortunately indefinite on certain points, expressly precluded 
the Transvaal government from forming relations of its own with any 
foreign Powers, or from territorial expansion. In the old days any deter- 
mined disposition on the part of the Boers to extend their borders in the 
interior would have probably been allowed entirely free play. But a new 
spirit was abroad, incarnate in the person of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, an English- 
man who had gone to South Africa in search of health and remained there 
in pursuit of empire. Mr. Rhodes dreamed of a vast African dominion 
under the British flag stretching from the Cape to Cairo. His energy 
created a chartered company which acquired territorial rights, overthrew 
the Matafoele king Lobengula, and cut off the Boer state from all expansion 
northwards. When the republic endeavoured to find an outlet to the sea, 
its enterprise was again checked, when the intervening territory was brought 
under direct British administration. 

Now the Transvaal Republic might, like the Orange Free State, have 
simply remained as a small shut-in self-governing state without creating 
any disturbance. But the Transvaalers were the sons of the stalwarts who 
fifty years before had sought to escape from all British control. They 
looked upon South Africa as a Dutch not a British inheritance; they 
resented the limitations imposed on them by the British, and their experi- 
ence had not taught them any respect for the British Empire. Their 
president, Paul Kruger, had himself gone on the great trek in his boyhood. 
It is not possible to doubt that President Kruger dreamed his own dreams 
of a United South Africa, but a South Africa under a Dutch flag, not 
under the Union Jack; though how far those dreams were shared by 
others is not equally clear. But whatever his ambitions outside the 
Transvaal, within the borders of the republic he intended to go his 
own way. 

In 1885, however, the discovery was made of valuable goldfields within 
the territories of the republic ; aliens, Uitlanders as they were called, for 
the most part British subjects, whatever their actual nationality might be, 
poured into the Transvaal to exploit the mines. The Boer government 
had no objection to the exploitation of the mines on its own terms, which 
did not include the concession of citizenship to the Uitlanders till after a 
very prolonged residence. All the burdens of citizenship were laid on the 
Uitlanders without its privileges. The Uitlanders began to feel that they 
had no security for justice, and to demand approximately the opportunities 
for acquiring citizenship in the Transvaal which were readily accorded to 
the Transvaaler who migrated into British territory. The objection of 
the Boer to admitting the Uitlander to political power was natural for 
obvious reasons. The Boer population was small ; if residence there was 
made too attractive to the aliens they would soon outnumber the legitimate 



932 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

inhabitants and, possessing full political privileges, would come to control 
the government. But there was an obvious retort also, that the Uitlanders' 
demand for political rights would cease to be active if in other respects they 
received fair play. The strength of the Uitlanders' case lay in the unjust 
burdens which were imposed on them. 

Superficially, then, the attitude of the two sides may be stated thus. 
The Uitlanders complained that they were admitted to the Transvaal only 
under grossly oppressive conditions, which could be remedied only by the 
ready concession of full citizenship. The Boers replied that the Uitlanders 
came unasked, and if they disliked the conditions on which they were 
admitted they might stay away ; to which the only possible answer was 
that the conditions imposed were such as no civilised state is warranted in 
imposing upon civilised immigrants. But behind the direct issue between 
Boers and Uitlanders events demonstrated that other motives were at work. 
President Kruger was aiming at consolidating a Boer state which should 
take the lead in establishing a Dutch ascendency in South Africa, while Mr. 
Rhodes and his associates were planning to utilise the trouble in the 
Transvaal in order to establish a British ascendency within the Transvaal 
itself. The rash haste of Dr. Jameson, the administrator of Mashonaland 
on the western border of the Transvaal, brought on a crisis prematurely 
and, in the historic phrase of Mr. Rhodes, tl upset the applecart." Misled 
into the belief that the Uitlanders were ready to rise in arms, Dr. Jameson 
made his dash on Johannesburg. The Uitlanders were not ready to rise, 
the invaders were enveloped by a superior force of Boers, and the Jameson 
Raid ended in a complete fiasco. 

The first news of the raid excited enthusiasm in England, for there 
was a general belief that the raiders had nobly taken their lives in their 
hands and rushed upon their fate in the desperate hope of rescuing their 
countrymen and countrywomen in Johannesburg from the vindictive 
brutality of the Boers. The excitement was increased by the publication 
of a telegram of congratulation from the German Kaiser to the President of 
the Transvaal. But the gradual realisation of the character of the blunder 
which had been committed created in place of the first sentiment a sense of 
indignant impotence. A very strong case for intervention had been given 
away by sheer recklessness, and Mr. Kruger took full advantage of the 
situation. The raid was a piece of absolutely lawless aggression on the part 
of a responsible British official, for which it was quite impossible to produce 
reasonable justification. The Uitlanders' lives had not been in danger ; 
the raid had not been the outcome of a generous impulse ; all the principles 
of international law would have warranted the sternest treatment of all the 
participators. But the politic president handed over the raiders to be tried 
by the British, and imposed no excessive penalties upon the Uitlanders 
who were concerned. He had been gratuitously furnished with a complete 
answer to all appeals, protests, or demands ; and his position was still 
further strengthened when a public enquiry was held in England, in which 



LORD SALISBURY 933 

it appeared impossible to question that the chiefs of both political parties 
connived at the suppression of any really searching investigation. If the 
British public felt dissatisfied, the Boers only saw a more convincing proof 
that the raid had been the abortive outcome of a great conspiracy against 
their liberties, with the British Government at the back of it. That con- 
viction, it may be remarked, was generally shared on the European 
Continent. 

On the face of it, if Mr. Kruger wanted nothing more than to secure 
himself against British interference in the administration of the Transvaal, 
it merely remained for him to make some small concessions to the 
Uitlanders as a further demonstration of magnanimity. Instead of this, 
however, he apparently resolved to use the raid as a lever for obtaining 
complete independence. In defiance of the Convention, he despatched 
mission's to Europe and made treaties with Portugal, Holland, and the 
Orange Free State. By so doing he lost the advantage he had hitherto 
possessed of claiming that the British had, and he had not, overstepped 
the limitations imposed upon them respectively by recognised law. His 
treatment of the Uitlanders became more high-handed than ever. But 
even the raid could not be reckoned as a permanent counterpoise to all 
British and Uitlander grounds of complaint. Feeling, moreover, was 
running high in South Africa between the races, many of the Dutch in 
Cape Colony having become much more sympathetic towards the Transvaal 
government than they had been at an earlier stage. There was, therefore, 
very general satisfaction when the British Government despatched to South 
Africa a new High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, who bore the universal 
reputation of an experienced and exceptionally capable administrator, clear- 
headed, liberal-minded, sympathetic, and self-reliant. 

Sir Alfred set about his task of investigation without haste and without 
prejudice. Nevertheless, it took him no very long time to form certain 
definite conclusions. The grievances of the Uitlanders were intolerable, 
and the only remedy for them was political enfranchisement. The Boer 
government was arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt. There was something 
in the nature of a conspiracy to establish a Dutch ascendency. It was 
time for the British Government to assert itself and to insist upon reforms. 
Any hesitation would only be attributed to weakness. If a firm front were 
shown it was not likely that the Boers would resort to arms ; if they did, 
they would very promptly be taught the futility of resistance. 

These views were adopted by the home Government in spite of urgent 
warnings from the principal military authority at the Cape, Sir William 
Butler, that immense forces would be required to make compulsion effective. 
Sir William had on other occasions advocated unpopular views, and bore 
in official circles the reputation which can only be expressed by the term 
"crank," and his advice was ignored. At the close of May 1899, then, Sir 
Alfred met President Kruger at the Conference of Bloemfontein, the capital 
of the Orange Free State. The negotiations failed. In effect Sir Alfred's 



934 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

demand was that Uitlanders should be entitled to the franchise after five 
years' residence ; President Kruger was only prepared to submit to the 
" Volksraad " a proposal for enfranchisement after seven years' residence if, 
as a preliminary, the British gave an unqualified undertaking to abstain en* 
tirely from further intervention in the future. 

In England the belief was perhaps general that the Transvaal would 
not fight, and that if it did the Orange Free State would stand neutral. In 
the Transvaal there was a general belief that the British would give way 
after one or two reverses, and that even if they did not Europe would in- 
tervene and compel them to submit. On October 9th President Kruger 
delivered an ultimatum requiring the immediate withdrawal of the British 
troops which had been assembled at points on the frontier. On the 12th 
the Boers crossed the Natal border in force and the great South African 
War began. 



IV 

THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 

The British Government entered on the struggle upon the basis of a 
huge miscalculation. There appears to have been a general impression 
that the Boers, on a liberal estimate, could not put as many as thirty 
thousand efficient men in the field, and that thirty thousand farmers armed 
with rifles would by no means be a match for fifty thousand British regulars 
armed with superior artillery. As a matter of fact the two republics could 
take the field with armies numbering not far short of eighty thousand ; and 
for years past the Transvaal had been utilising the wealth extracted from 
the gold-mines to accumulate war-stores and to purchase guns which com- 
pletely outranged those of the British. Their forces were exceedingly 
mobile, being almost entirely mounted infantry, amply provided with 
horses which were accustomed to the country, while they themselves were 
consummate horse-masters and dead shots. Moreover, the strategical 
advantages enjoyed by the Boers were immense. Their frontier was an 
elongated semicircle guarded by mountain ranges exceedingly difficult for 
regular troops to penetrate ; while they themselves, holding the interior 
lines, could with great rapidity transfer large masses of troops from point 
to point of the frontier, an operation entirely impossible for the British. 
Also at the moment chosen for the declaration of war the British regular 
troops, of which the great bulk were merely infantry, numbered not much 
more than twenty thousand men ; and, for political reasons, two-thirds of 
these had been massed with complete disregard of strategical considerations 
at Ladysmith and Dundee in the northern angle < f Natal. On the opposite 
side of the Orange Free State a strong garrison held Kimberley, the centre 
of the diamond mines, and to the north of Kimberley, on the Transvaal 



LORD SALISBURY 935 

frontier, Colonel Baden-Powell was at Mafeking with some nine hundred 
combatants under his command — volunteers and irregulars. Other points 
at the south were held by Generals French and Gatacre, but co-operatioiji 
between these various forces was quite impossible. 

Though the Boer commanders showed no little ability in the field, their 
conceptions of strategy were happily of an elementary character. The 
sound policy for them would have been to leave containing forces sufficient 
to check active operations from Ladysmith and Kimberley, and to strike at 
once in force at the Cape itself, a policy which, with the greatly superior 
numbers which they controlled at the outset, would have been entirely 
practicable. An invasion of the Cape would probably have brought to 
their standard large 
numbers of the dis- 
affected Cape Dutch, 
and the British would 
in that case have had 
to reconquer the Cape 
itself. Instead of this, 
however, the Boers 
concentrated their en- 
ergies upon the sieges 
of Ladysmith, of Kim- 
berley, and of Mafe- 
king. 

At the very outset 
it became obvious that the British position at Glencoe near Dundee was 
untenable. By October 26th the force there had effected its retreat to 
Ladysmith, where the army remained shut up for four months. In 
November reinforcements arrived at the Cape under command of General 
Buller. The fact that Mr. Rhodes was at Kimberley had been extremely 
useful, because it had filled the Boers with an intense desire to capture 
that post and the person of the man whom they regarded as their arch 
enemy ; so that Kimberley for them acquired a wholly fictitious import- 
ance. General Buller decided that both Ladysmith and Kimberley must 
be relieved ; he himself undertook the campaign on the east, while that on 
the west was entrusted to Lord Methuen. The Boers contented themselves 
with occupying the ground beyond the Tugela, blocking the way to Lady- 
smith, while advanced forces were thrown out from the neighbourhood of 
Kimberley to block the progress of Lord Methuen. 

In the second week in December came a series of disasters. After a 
sharp struggle, Methuen forced the passage of the Modder River, and on the 
night of the 10th he attempted to surprise the Boer General Cronje in the 
-strongly entrenched position which he occupied at Magersfontein. The 
task was entrusted to the Highland Brigade. But the Highlanders advanc- 
ing in the dark in close order, which in a night attack must be preserved 




The Terrace Mountain Ranges of South Africa. 



936 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

till the last moment, reached the enemy's lines before they knew they had 
done so. Suddenly, without warning, a storm of fire belched forth from 
the Boer entrenchments ; in three minutes six hundred of the Highlanders 
had fallen. They broke, only to rally the moment they reached cover, but 
an advance was impossible. Though reinforcements presently arrived, to 
carry the entrenchments by a frontal attack was out of the question. The 
advance to the relief of Kimberley was completely blocked. 

On the previous day General Gatacre in the south had attempted to 
strike at a Boer force which was at last invading Cape Colony. His force 
was cut in two at Stormberg, and six hundred British soldiers became 
prisoners of war. In the east on the 15th Buller attempted the passage of 
the Tugela, and was repulsed with heavy loss at Colenso. The whole 
offensive movement was entirely paralysed. 

The " black week " aroused the nation to the consciousness of the 
immensity of the task which it had undertaken, but with grim determina- 
tion it resolved to carry it through. The call to arms met with an eager 
response not only in the British Isles but from Canada and from Australasia. 
The veteran Lord Roberts, the hero of the Afghan War, was despatched to 
take the supreme command, having as his Chief of Staff Lord Kitchener, 
who had achieved the highest reputation by the reconquest of the Soudan, 
of which the story will presently be told. 

It was not till the second week in February that Lord Roberts was 
ready to put his new plan of campaign in operation. In the meantime 
Ladysmith had been subjected to a fierce attack, beaten off with dogged 
valour. Again General Buller had carried a large force across the Tugela 
to storm and carry the Boer position at Spionkop — for it would seem that 
at the end of the day the Boers believed that the British were established 
on the crest, and were preparing to beat a retreat. But so deadly had the 
struggle been that the exceptionally gallant officer, who had taken the 
command when General Woodgate fell mortally wounded, believed that 
the position was wholly untenable ; and it was the British, not the Boers 
who retreated. Yet Ladysmith still held out with grim resolution, Kimberley 
defied its besiegers in the west, while the lively and resourceful defence of 
Mafeking gave even a flavour of comedy to the great tragedy. 

From the moment of the opening of Roberts' campaign the tide turned 
completely. Buller was left to fight his way to Ladysmith, but except for 
this the whole of the now large force collected in South Africa was to be 
engaged in a sweeping movement of invasion, taking Kimberley by the way. 
While attention was concentrated on the advance of the main army, 
General French, with a strong column of cavalry, was despatched on a race 
by a more easterly route to ensure the envelopment of the Boers before 
Kimberley. On the fourth day the siege was raised. The besiegers made 
a dash for the gap which the slower movements of Roberts with his infantry 
force had not yet closed up. But one British detachment was able to hang 
on the rear of the retreating Cronje, while the cavalry again issuing from 



LORD SALISBURY 937 

Kimberley headed him off the line on which he was retiring. At 
Paardeberg Cronje was trapped after a furious fight, and in spite of the 
obstinacy with which he held out in a position elaborately entrenched, his 
whole force was reduced to surrender nine days after the battle of Paarde- 
berg, on February 27th. 

While these successful operations were being carried on in the western 
theatre, Buller had at last found a practicable line of advance. This time 
the turning movement was successful, and on the day after Cronje's sur- 
render the Boers were on the retreat from before Ladysmith. In seventeen 







The surrender of General Cronje at Paardeberg. 
[From a photograph, by permission of the " Graphic."] 

days the entire aspect of the war had been changed. A fortnight later 
Lord Roberts was in Bloemfontein. A great epidemic of typhoid delayed 
further operations until May 1st, when the march upon Pretoria began. On 
May 17 Mafeking was relieved, a piece of intelligence which sent the entire 
population at home temporarily off its head. On June 5th Lord Roberts was 
in Pretoria. 

The sweeping advance met with occasional resistance, but the Boers 
were unable to attempt a pitched battle. Still, however, a detached force 
of Free-Staters, generally commanded by Christian De Wet, carried on 
perpetual raids upon the British communications and snapped up isolated 



938 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

detachments ; while the rapidity of De Wet's movements and the com- 
pleteness of his information enabled him to evade pursuit. President 
Kruger had himself departed from Pretoria, but his official Government and 
the Transvaal army were still in being. A severe defeat was inflicted on 
this force at Diamond Hill on June i ith, which may be regarded as the last 
pitched battle of the war. And yet it was not till September that Mr. 
Kruger had so far despaired of the republic that he withdrew to the coast 
and took ship for Europe. 

Lord Roberts, with a somewhat premature optimism, was able to 
announce that the war was practically over, and departed, leaving Lord 
Kitchener to complete the subjugation of the rebels who still remained in 
arms — rebels in the exceedingly technical sense that they were in arms 
against the power which had formally proclaimed its sovereignty. The 
chief political authority was still in the hands of Sir Alfred, who had now 
become Viscount Milner. At home Lord Salisbury took the opportunity for 
appealing to the country by a dissolution, when the electorate definitely 
pronounced that the work of settling South Africa should be completed by 
the Government which had entered upon the war. The attitude of a 
section of the Liberal party had produced an impression that whatever 
might be the sins and shortcomings of the Unionists it would be dangerous 
to entrust the government to a party which was suspected of an unpatriotic 
sympathy with the country's enemies. The Unionist majority after the 
general election still stood at 130, 

Yet for another eighteen months the war remained particularly lively. 
The Boer leaders, so long as they were able to maintain a guerilla warfare, 
declined to consider themselves beaten or to accept anything short of that 
complete sovereign independence for which they had been fighting from 
the beginning. The brilliant audacity and resourcefulness of several 
leaders, and, above all, of the ubiquitous and irrepressible De Wet, inspired 
the hearty admiration of the British ; while the conduct of many of the 
farm people, who acted as combatants or non-combatants according to the 
convenience of the moment, kept alive an acute irritation. The severities 
involved were angrily denounced ; and while the population was to a great 
extent gathered into " concentration camps " by the British Government, 
and there maintained and kept in security, fictitious stories of British 
brutality were freely circulated and believed all over the European 
Continent. From first to last, however, one fact had been conspicuous. 
While the press of nearly all Europe united in denouncing the British, the 
Powers had recognised the futility of any intervention in a war which 
would involve fighting not with British armies but with British fleets. The 
British command of the sea was so decisive that the Powers, whatever 
their inclinations might be, had no choice but to leave the Boer States to 
take care of themselves. 

Meanwhile Lord Kitchener, with imperturbable persistency, drew the 
lines of his block-houses across the country until he had at last formed an 






LORD SALISBURY 939 

impenetrable net, pressing ever closer and closer upon the Boers, who 
still fought on until at last that indomitable people recognised that exter- 
mination was the only alternative to submission. In March 1902 they 
opened negotiations, which were conducted on behalf of the British with 
unfailing tact and firmness by Lord Kitchener. On May 31st the provisional 
government signed the treaty which terminated the war. The republics 
were incorporated in the British Empire, in the first instance as Crown 
colonies, but with the promise or at least the hope that before long they 
might be placed in the same position as the colonies which enjoyed 
responsible government. Great Britain provided them with -£3,000,000 in 
order to establish them on a working financial basis ; and the use of the 
Dutch language was to be permitted in the schools and law courts. 
Broadly speaking, it was resolved that the conquered states should not be 
treated ^as subject nationalities which must be kept in subjection with a 
strong hand ; the way was prepared instead for accepting them as free and 
loyal denizens of the British Empire. 



V 

THE SECOND SALISBURY ADMINISTRATION 

The return of the Unionists to power in 1895 enticed one of the rising 
statesmen of that party to prophesy that there would be no more troubles 
with foreign Powers, which only took advantage of the weakness of Liberal 
Governments. The prophecy was hardly uttered before it was falsified. 
A dispute was already in progress with France in regard to Siam ; and 
it was settled peacefully at the beginning of 1896 only because Lord 
Salisbury judged that the subject in dispute was not worth a war. In 
fact his diplomacy was habitually open precisely to the charge levelled 
against Liberals of making concessions in preference to insisting upon 
every claim for which a plausible justification could be brought forward. 
The plain fact was that the responsible leaders of both parties usually took 
very much the same view as to the general principles of action in foreign 
affairs. British interests were to be safeguarded, but an aggressive tone 
was to be avoided, and practical considerations were not to be over-ridden 
by abstract objections to the methods which other nations chose to adopt, 
or by a desire to check the natural craving for expansion on the part 
of other peoples than the British. The rule of avoiding isolated interven- 
tion was to be strictly observed. And these principles were not always 
to the taste of the advanced members either of the one party which was 
unduly hasty in discovering that British interests were involved, or of the 
other which was too eager that Britain should constitute herself not only 
the advocate but the fighting champion of oppressed populations and 
nationalities. 



94o THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Thus in 1896 a grave situation was created by the threatening language 
of the United States, which in effect claimed the right to dictate the 
settlement of a boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela ; and 
extremists were far from being pleased when the case was submitted 
to arbitration. Lord Salisbury's justification was complete, when after 
long delays the award of the arbitrators confirmed the British view in 
practically every detail. Again in 1896 there was a great outburst of 
popular indignation over ugly stories of massacres by the Turks in Armenia. 
In spite of the agitation, however, Lord Salisbury refused an isolated inter- 
vention, wherein he was warmly supported by Lord Rosebery, who, partly 
in consequence of the line adopted by a large number of Liberals, at this 
time resigned the leadership of the Liberal party and assumed the role 
of a candid and independent critic. But if Lord Salisbury declined to 
send armies to Armenia, Britain could take a definite lead in another case, 
in virtue of her position as the premier naval power. In effect it was 
British interposition which saved Greece from paying the full penalty for 
challenging Turkey to a war in which she was very decisively worsted, 
and compelled the Turks to concede the establishment of an autonomous 
government in Crete with a Greek prince at the head of it in 1897. On 
the other hand, British diplomacy appeared to come off badly when the 
victory of Japan in a struggle with China led to a scramble among the 
European Powers for Chinese territory, and Russia appropriated some 
of the fruits of the war to which the Japanese seemed legitimately entitled. 
Lord Salisbury, in fact, did not want Chinese territory, though he desired 
and obtained from the Powers concerned the open door for commerce. 
Japan was to prove later that she was very well able to take care of her 
own interests. 

Of much more importance than the remote East in the eyes of the 
Government was the position of affairs of Egypt. Since 1885 the 
Egyptian government had left the Sudan to itself. The Mahdi died in 
that year, to be succeeded by the Khalifa Abdullah, who continued to 
organise a sort of empire among the wild Sudanese. Now it was still in 
theory the desire of the British Government to withdraw from Egypt, but 
it was entirely obvious that a British withdrawal would leave Egypt a 
prey to the Khalifa. In 1896 it was resolved that in order to curb the 
dervishes, as the Khalifa's followers were called, it was necessary to push 
the Egyptian frontier to the south, up the Nile to Dongola. The jealousy 
of Russia and France caused those Powers to exercise their legal rights 
in restraining the Egyptian government from providing funds for a 
campaign. The money was therefore advanced by the British Government, 
and before the end of the year Dongola was occupied without serious 
resistance. But the advance had only made it clear that the time 
had really arrived for the reconquest of the Sudan. With systematic 
precision Sir Herbert Kitchener prepared his plans not merely for a 
campaign of victories, but for an effective strategic occupation. In 1898 



LORD SALISBURY 941 

the regular advance began, and in September the Khalifa's forces were 
completely shattered at the decisive battle of Omdurman. Abdullah, how- 
ever, escaped, and it was not till the end of 1899 that the last resistance of 
the dervishes was finally crushed. 

Omdurman itself was followed by an incident which threatened to bring 
about a war with France. A French expedition, commanded by Major 
Marchand, had started some two years before from the French Sudan. In 
the summer of 1898 the intrepid explorer and his party penetrated into the 
Egyptian Sudan and reached Fashoda, where they hoisted the French flag 




The Palace of the Governor-General of the Sudan at Khartum. 

and repulsed an attack on the part of the dervishes. It is impossible to 
question that but for the advance of Kitchener the little party would very 
soon have been annihilated. Hearing a report that there were troops com- 
manded by white officers at Fashoda, Sir Herbert proceeded up the Nile, 
found Major Marchand at Fashoda, complimented him on his brilliant 
enterprise, and hoisted the British and Egyptian flags. The indignant 
Frenchman declared that Fashoda was French territory, on which the 
French flag had been hoisted before it was in occupation by the British ; 
and French sentiment became greatly excited. But the fact was too 
obvious that Fashoda had not been in effective French occupation, and that 
Marchand would never have been heard of again if the dervish forces had 



942 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

not been shattered by the British and Egyptian army. The French 
claims were ultimately withdrawn and the respective frontiers delimited. 
In the sphere of foreign politics, as actively affecting this country, one 




Egypt and the Sudan. 

other event remains to be chronicled during this period. China had re- 
ceived a very rude shock in the Japanese War, and a series of further shocks 
when one after another of the European Powers forced treaties and conces- 



LORD SALISBURY 943 

sions upon her. At the same time a progressive party, which was becoming 
alive to the advantages possessed by Europeans, was temporarily dominant, 
and set about the introduction of a series of reforms by no means to the 
taste of the conservative Manchus, the dominant race to which the reigning 
dynasty belonged. A coup d'etat restored the ascendency of the Dowager 
Empress and the old 
regime, and very soon 
afterwards began what 
was called the Boxer 
rising, directed largely 
against Christians and 
"foreign devils." 
There was very little 
doubt that the move- 
ment was fomented by 
the government, al- 
though nugatory edicts 
were issued against the 
insurgents. The lega- 
tions of the European 
Powers at Pekin were 
besieged and cut off 
from all communica- 
tion with the outside 
world ; and the attempt 
to effect a relief by 
means of an entirely 
inadequate mixed force 
under Admiral Sey- 
mour failed. The re- 
lieving force itself had 
to be relieved. The 
Powers, working in 
reasonable concert, at 
length collected a suf- 
ficient force which marched on Pekin under the command of the German 
Marshal Count Waldersee. Happily it was found that the legations had 
held out successfully. A heavy war indemnity was imposed upon the 
Chinese, and the incident terminated without any rupture among the 
Powers. 

In India the most prominent events were the two disastrous famines 
of 1897 and 1900, a severe and prolonged outbreak of the bubonic 
plague, and a somewhat exceptionally severe period of compaigning among 
the tribes in the north-west frontier presently followed by the organisa- 
tion of a frontier province separate from the Punjab. 




Queen Victoria, 1837-1900. 
[From a photograph by Bassano.] 



944 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

In the sphere of domestic legislation Ireland again had its turn. Home 
Rule was for the time being put entirely out of court, and the still unhealed 
division in the ranks of the Irish Nationalists kept that party comparatively 
inactive. It was the main business of the Unionists to demonstrate 
that the people of Ireland could still be sympathetically and satisfactorily 
governed without having a legislature of their own at Dublin. Mr. 
Chamberlain had not departed from his old desire to extend to Ireland 
methods of self-government which should not involve the separation of 
the legislatures. On the land question, while there was sufficient variety 
in the ideal solutions which individuals were inclined to propound, every- 
one wanted to improve the lot of the tenants without inflicting undue 
loss upon landlords. The main difference between the two parties was 
that one was somewhat more anxious on the landlords' behalf and the 
other on that of the tenants. Hence the Government introduced a Land 
Bill with the usual object of improving the facilities for land purchase. 
Being favourably received by the Nationalists, it was denounced by the 
Irish landlords as a betrayal of their interests. Being modified in their 
favour, it was denounced again with equal fervour by the Nationalists. 
Ultimately the withdrawal of sundry amendments left the landlords sore 
and the Nationalists on the whole pacified. This Land Act of 1896 
was followed by the Local Government Act of 1898, which established 
elective county councils and district councils. The working of the Act 
in Ireland has not differed conspicuously from the working of the earlier 
Local Government Act in England. 

Here, however, the Unionists were not altogether satisfied with their 
own handiwork. The London County Council had exercised the powers 
bestowed upon it with an activity which inspired alarm in Conservative 
quarters. A new Act broke up the great municipality into a number of 
boroughs, to which a portion of the powers of the London County 
Council were transferred. 

Three other measures demand brief notice. In 1896 an Agricultural 
Rating Act was passed to diminish the pressure of the rates upon the 
land. Ostensibly it was intended to relieve the tenant ; in actual practice 
it was no doubt the landlords who benefited. A comprehensive Education 
Bill was introduced in the same year, but its extremely complicated char- 
acter compelled its withdrawal, and a simpler bill was introduced in the 
next year. In effect the intention was to free the voluntary or de- 
nominational schools from the disadvantages under which they stood 
as compared with those schools which were entirely supported out of 
public funds. The schools were relieved from liability for the rates, and 
were given a substantial capitation grant, while the Church authorities 
still retained complete control of the management. The Opposition de- 
nounced the measure as appropriating public money practically in order 
to foster the denominational teaching of the Established Church, as 
they denounced the Agricultural Rating Act as a " dole " to the landlords. 



LORD SALISBURY 945 

The third measure was an Employers' Liability Bill, making the employers 
in certain trades responsible in case of injury to their workmen, but this 
also was denounced by the Opposition on the ground that it permitted 
contracting out and was therefore practically valueless to the workmen. 

The clamour of the general election of 1900 had hardly died down 
when the nation was plunged into mourning by the death of Queen Victoria 
in the sixty-fourth year of her reign, the longest in our annals. The 
parliamentary situation however was not affected. The Liberal party was 
virtually paralysed by the extreme divergencies among both leaders and 
rank and file on the subject of the Boer War ; and although on all sides 
there were wrathful denunciations of the blunders and miscalculations of 
which the administration had been guilty in the first stages of the struggle, 
the country had very definitely refused to displace ministers in favour of a 
party so divided on the most important issue of the hour. When at the 
end of 1 90 1 Lord Rosebery emerged again into activity, it seemed for the 
moment that the bulk of the Liberals and a large proportion of those who 
had only supported the Government faute de mieux would be ready to unite 
under Lord Rosebery's banner, but that statesman had no wish to create 
a party of his own. When it became clear that it would not be possible 
for him to act in harmony with the official Liberal chief, Sir Henry 
Campbell-Bannerman, he reverted to the position of candid friend. But 
his intervention had not been without effect in emphasising the general 
feeling that more serious and more tactful efforts must be made to bring 
the hostilities to an end. 

Though Lord Rosebery had failed to re-unite the Liberals, their 
differences were in fact connected very much more with the past than with 
the future. When once the war was over there was nothing really to 
prevent a reunion, since the imperialist section had rejected the temptation 
to organise itself as a separate party. The Government made haste in 
1892 to provide the Opposition with a bond of union by bringing in a 
new Education Bill, which was unanimously condemned by every section 
of the Liberals. More decisively than ever the bill asserted the principle 
of retaining the entire management of voluntary schools under clerical 
control, of preserving religious tests for the teachers, and of paying the 
greater part of the expenses out of public funds. But before the measure 
became law Lord Salisbury had retired from office and Mr. Arthur Balfour 
had become Prime Minister. 

Here must be added the record of an important step on the part of 
the colonies, taken in the last year of the century. The Australian group 
federated themselves as the Australian Commonwealth, on the analogy of 
the Canadian dominion ; although, as Newfoundland continued to stand 
outside the Canadian federation, so New Zealand continued to stand out- 
side the Australian federation. This may perhaps be taken as the moment 
when it began to be recognised that the term "colony" was ceasing or had 
Ceased to be properly applicable to the autonomous states of the British 

30 



94 6 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Empire. Thenceforth it gradually became customary to speak of them 
not as the Colonies but as the Dominions. 



VI 

TRANSITIONAL 

Until the accession of Queen Victoria, the longest reign in our history 
had been that of her grandfather, King George III., which had covered 
a period of sixty years. During the last ten of those years he had suffered 
a living death and had taken no part in public affairs. Queen Victoria 
had reached her eighty-second year when she died with faculties unimpaired 
and in the enjoyment of a popular loyalty which had perhaps never been 
higher. The celebration of her jubilee, the fiftieth year of her reign, 
thirteen years before, had been the occasion of great public enthusiasm ; 
and it had been used to assemble together from all parts of the empire 
such a gathering of her subjects as had vividly impressed the people of 
England with the sense of imperial splendour. That impression had been 
more than confirmed ten years /ater by the celebration of what was called 
the Diamond Jubilee. The pageantry of these great functions appealed 
to the general imagination, and perhaps did more than any amount of 
reasoned discourse to give life to the new spirit of imperialism — a sense 
that the British Empire is something more than a number of red spots 
on a map. That consciousness was still further vitalised when the South 
African War displayed the deep-seated devotion of the dominions overseas 
to the British flag. The Great Queen died before the war-cloud was 
dispersed, while the future of one great section of her vast dominions was 
still gloomily uncertain ; but she had lived to see the old indifferentism 
pass, and to know that her empire was united as it had never been before. 
When she came to the throne the Crown had lost its hold on the affections 
of the people ; it had been her task to regain for it the loyalty of the 
nation. She had made no attempt to recover for it the powers of control 
which had passed for ever to parliament, but she created for it a moral 
influence which remains a vital factor in the national life. Her personal 
withdrawal from public functions after the death of the Prince Consort 
diminished for a time the ornamental value of the monarchy ; but even 
when she was least before the public eye her ministers relied upon her 
political sagacity, and her judgment influenced the councils of the monarchs 
of Europe. England has known four queens regnant in the course of 
a thousand years ; it is noteworthy that the reigns of three out of the 
four have covered some of the most conspicuously brilliant periods of the 
national history. Queen Anne indeed can claim little credit for the glories 
of her age, but Elizabeth and Victoria both stand beside and perhaps 
above the greatest of all our kings. 



LORD SALISBURY 947 

Less than three years before Queen Victoria died Mr. Gladstone, who 
had first entered parliament five years before the queen's accession. He 
attained Cabinet rank in Peel's ministry fifty years before he formed the 
last administration of which he was himself the head. For very nearly 
thirty years he was the acknowledged chief of one of the two great parties, 
at least if we disregard his temporary abdication during Lord Beaconsfield's 
rule. In the last three years of his life he had only once been stirred to 
public utterance, and sufficient time had elapsed for his political opponents 
to discover in him virtues previously unsuspected. Endowed with an 
extraordinarily persuasive eloquence, an extreme intellectual subtlety, and 
an intense moral fervour, he applied 
ethical standards to political life with a 
surprising courage which it would be 
difficult to parallel. Like his master 
Peel, he spent his life in assimilating 
one after another ideas to which he 
had at first been strongly antagonistic. 
His weakness lay in that excessive in- 
tellectual subtlety which made it easy 
for him to persuade himself that what 
he had come to regard as morally right 
was demonstrably expedient, and that 
what he realised as expedient was war- 
ranted by the highest moral sanctions. 
But whatever judgment future genera- 
tions may pass upon his wisdom or 
upon his powers of self-deception, it 
will always be recognised that he im- 
ported into politics an insistence upon 

the doctrine that the highest morality is also the highest expediency, 
which has given him a unique position among the practical politicians of 
history. 

Six years earlier passed away his great contemporary, Alfred Tennyson. 
It may well be that future ages will not recognise Tennyson as the greatest 
literary figure of his time in England ; but this is certain, that he will 
always be the poet most representative of the Victorian Era. A con- 
summate artificer in verse, his merely technical skill would give him high 
rank among the poets of any age ; he taught to lesser men a style which 
made his own age peculiarly rich in minor poets, imitators of the master, 
who learnt to dress thoughts which did not rise above the commonplace in 
dainty and musical phrases. As distinctively as Pope he was the typical 
poet of his own day, not because he was a particularly profound thinker 
or a particularly deep student of humanity, but because he gave an almost 
perfect expression to the prevalent philosophy and the prevalent ideals of 
the time. 




Alfred Lord Tennyson. 
[After the painting by G. F. Watts.] 



948 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

All the three great figures which have just been described were repre- 
sentative of the transitional period which politically was that of the passage 
from oligarchy to democracy. The arrival of democracy, the acquisition 
of political power by the hitherto unenfranchised masses of the community, 
was the essential change attained in the closing years of the nineteenth 
century, and the great problem now becoming of vital importance was how 
those newly enfranchised masses would organise themselves. One thing 
was certain, that for a hundred years past they had ceased to acquiesce in 
the existing distribution of the wealth of the community. They did not 
recognise the justice of the principles on which that distribution had been 
arrived at by practically unmitigated individual competition. They did not 
accept the theory that to disturb that distribution was an unwarrantable 
interference with the sacred rights of property. But for half a century the 
more intelligent of them, those who were employed in trades which required 
skill and intelligence, had been learning to organise themselves, and their 
leaders, the men who had organised them while they were still unen- 
franchised, were no revolutionaries. They relied upon combination to 
secure a gradual rise in wages, a gradual diminution in the hours of 
labour. 

But a prolonged period of trade depression set in not long after the 
trade unions won their legal recognition in 1875. The result was that 
wages fell instead of rising, and the unions repeatedly found themselves 
unable to hold their own when they challenged conflicts with the masters. 
The result again was discontent on the part of large numbers of the work- 
ing men with the acquiescent attitude of the trade union leaders, and that 
" new unionism " developed which not only called for much more aggressive 
action outside the legislature, but also demanded active state intervention ; 
not as in the past to secure liberty of action for the workman; but to impose 
restrictions upon the employer. Labour in effect was to fight to obtain 
actual control of the materials and methods of production. In other words, 
the definitely socialistic doctrine that the democratically governed state, not 
private individuals, should own and control the materials and methods of 
production in the interests of the workers, began to challenge the old in- 
dividualism on which the old unionism rested ; the individualism which 
professed at least to desire nothing more than the right of unfettered 
combination for the workmen. As yet, however, socialistic doctrine was 
confined to a small though exceedingly active section ; the old leaders still 
in the main held their own. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 

EPILOGUE 

I 



UNDER KING EDWARD VII 

The first phase of present-day party politics began with Mr. Gladstone's 
declaration in favour of Home Rule for Ireland ; the second began in 
1903 with Mr. Chamberlain's 
challenge of the principles of 
Free Trade, which had been 
held by the country practi- 
cally unquestioned for half a 
century. The parliamentary 
year opened pacifically with 
an Irish Land Bill, which 
achieved the apparent miracle 
of being accepted as satis- 
factory both by Irish land- 
lords and Irish tenants. The 
miracle was accomplished be- 
cause the British taxpayer 
provided the money and took 
the risks of the adjustment. 
But in the meanwhile the 
Colonial Secretary had been 
paying a visit to South Africa, 
whence he returned in the 
spring of 1903 with one alto- 
gether predominant idea in his mind — that the supreme task of states- 
manship was to draw closer the bonds which held the great British Empire 
together. In comparison with this everything else sank into insignificance. 
In May Mr. Chamberlain startled the world by proclaiming that one 
thing was needful to the consolidation of the Empire. The strength of 
the bond of sentiment had been nobly demonstrated by the gallant bands 
of volunteers who had rallied to the flag in the war now happily over. 
But the bond of sentiment was not sufficient ; it must be strengthened by 
interest, by what Thomas Carlyle called the u cash nexus." The United 

949 




King Edward VII. 
[After a photograph by Lafayette, Dublin.] 



950 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Kingdom must be prepared to make some economic sacrifice in the interest 
of the Dominions. The new bond was to be provided by the creation of 
a preferential market in Great Britain for colonial goods. 

No one in effect for fifty years had dreamed of reviving tariffs on 
imports. Tea, alcohol, and tobacco, and a few other articles, continued to 
be taxed for purposes of revenue, but no advantage was given to home or 
colonial producers of the taxed articles. In pathetic isolation Mr. Chaplin 
had pleaded for the protection of agriculture, and for a brief moment an 
attempt had been made to raise the cry of fair trade, retaliation, and 
" making the foreigner pay." No one had taken these things seriously. 
But when Mr. Chamberlain spoke it was impossible not to take him seriously. 
Covert Protectionists emerged from their despairing silence, men who had 
been bred if not born Free-Traders began to reconsider the arguments 
which they had never thought of disputing. Others whose economic faith 
was unshaken began to think that the economic sacrifice might after all be 
less than the political gain. The few Liberals who became immediate 
converts became also the most uncompromising and enthusiastic of the 
advocates of fiscal reform. 

But after the first shock of surprise there were no more defections 
among the Liberals from economic orthodoxy. Nothing perhaps could 
have been conceived better calculated to. close up the ranks of an Opposi- 
tion which as yet had only partly recovered from its disintegration. The 
salient fact fastened upon was that no preferential tariffs would be of appreci- 
able value to the dominions unless food-stuffs and raw materials were taxed 
in their favour, since their manufactures were practically a negligible quantity. 
To tax food-stuffs and raw materials would raise the price of the working 
man's food and the cost of production to the home manufacturer, who was 
dependent on foreign supplies for his raw material. There were many 
Unionists as well as Liberals to whom that argument appealed with great 
force. But when once Mr. Chamberlain had broken with the principle 
of Free Trade the attack upon it was developed all along the line. 
First it was urged that the tariffs would provide a revenue which might 
be appropriated to a scheme for granting Old Age Pensions, which Mr. 
Chamberlain had long advocated in the abstract. Then Mr. Balfour 
began to perceive a possibility that tariffs, though undesirable in themselves, 
might be used as battering-rams for breaking down the tariff walls raised 
against British goods by other countries. Moreover, it was not so clear 
that tariffs would raise prices. It was argued that the foreigner would pay ; 
he would lower his prices in order to keep his goods on the British market. 
Finally, the unqualified argument for Protection was brought into play. 
The competition of cheap foreign goods was on the verge of bringing to 
ruin the British producers. The industries which were thus suffering could 
only be saved by a tariff on the foreign articles — especially such as were 
11 dumped " at less than cost price by bounty-fed producers — which would 
enable the British producer to sell at a profitable rate. Thus these in- 



EPILOGUE 951 

dustries would provide increased employment for the British working-man. 
The answers given to these respective arguments were that as a matter of 
experience retaliation does not reduce hostile tariffs ; that we already pur- 
chase from the foreigner at bottom prices, and therefore he would not 
reduce them in order to meet the tariff ; that the argument for pure 
Protection came to nothing at all if the foreigner paid the tariff and supplied 
us as cheaply as before ; whereas, if Protection was rendered effective 
because it raised the price of the foreign product, it would also raise the 
price of the home product to the consumer. As for the argument that by 
protecting British industries employment would be increased, it was replied 
that the increased cost of all articles of consumption and especially of food 
would far more than counterbalance the supposed benefits to the workers. 

From 1903 till the end of 1905 the battle raged. The Liberals grew 
daily more united, while Mr. Balfour vainly endeavoured to avert a com- 
plete split among the Unionists. Four prominent supporters of the 
Government, including the Duke of Devonshire, retired from the Cabinet. 
At last in December 1905 Mr. Balfour resigned ; Sir Henry Campbell- 
Bannerman accepted office, and immediately afterwards appealed to the 
electorate. The result was overwhelming. The Liberals were returned 
with a solid majority of eighty-four over all the other parties put together ; 
and even of those parties they could count generally on the support of 
more than eighty Irish Nationalists and more than fifty members who had 
been returned by the Labour party which for some years past had been 
steadily organising itself. The whole body of the Unionists numbered less 
than one hundred and sixty. But it must be remarked that the Liberal leaders 
were expressly pledged not to use their majority to deal with the question 
of Irish Home Rule ; while the fiscal reformers declared that the battle had 
been won largely on a false issue through the prominence given to the 
question of employing Chinese labour in South Africa. 

It was admitted, then, by the Opposition that the country had for the 
moment pronounced decisively against fiscal reform, but only because it 
had not become thoroughly accustomed to the idea. It was not admitted 
that the country had intended to authorise any positive item in the Liberal 
programme. This view was naturally not accepted by the Liberals, who 
for precisely twenty years had had practically no voice in legislation, since 
in their last brief period of office all their measures with the exception of 
the budgets had been either eviscerated or thrown out by the House of 
Lords. Almost at once they embarked upon an extensive programme of 
reforms. They began by accepting a bill from the labour party for the 
protection of trade unions. It will be remembered that the Act of 1874 
was supposed to have protected trade unions from being sued as corporate 
bodies ; but in 1903 a judgment of the law courts known as the Taff 
Vale Decision had shattered this impression. The Act of 1906 was in- 
tended simply to establish as law what the world at large had supposed 
to be the law for nearly thirty years. 



952 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

The next step was a bill to abolish plural voting ; that is, to prevent one 
person from recording a vote in more than one constituency. On the 
ground that this was merely a party move, since it was notorious that the 
great majority of plural voters were Unionists, and also on the ground that 
such a change should not be introduced except in association with other 
changes readjusting the existing unfair distribution of voting power, the 
bill was thrown out by the Lords. 

Then the Government attacked the education question, in accordance 
with the demands of nonconformists. Voluntary schools where the educa- 
tion was conducted on a denominational basis were not to be supported 
out of public funds. If they could not be maintained, the local authority 
was to have power to take them over, to assume the control, and to give 
the undenominational teaching which, from the point of view of Anglicans 
and Roman Catholics, was rather worse than purely secular education. 
The Lords made drastic amendments which the Government would not 
accept, and the bill was dropped. 

In 1907 the programme was less aggressive. The budget however had 
two new features. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Asquith, for the 
first time dropped what had long been the fiction of professing to regard 
income tax as a source of revenue with which the country might presently 
dispense. Accepting it then as a permanent source of revenue, Mr. 
Asquith modified it by reducing the amount to be paid on incomes which 
were directly earned as compared with incomes derived from real property 
and from investments. 

The great measure of the year was Mr Haldane's scheme of army 
reform, which aimed at producing the maximum of efficiency without 
departing from the principle of voluntary recruitment. No party in the 
state had hitherto ventured to commit itself to approval of any of those 
schemes for compulsory service which were in general urgently demanded 
by military men in view of the huge armies controlled by the European 
nations. The main point of the scheme was the reorganisation of the 
militia, the yeomanry, and the volunteers into the body known as 
"territorials." So far the scheme Was viewed with very general favour 
except by those who were prepared to denounce any scheme which failed 
to provide for compulsory service. Criticism was mainly directed against 
certain reductions in the regular army for foreign service, and in the 
garrison artillery ; while it was urged on the other side that the reductions 
meant nothing more than the removal of inefficients, and that in effect the 
regular army was rendered not a less but a more efficient striking force. 
This appears to have been admitted by the experts, even although they 
resented the actual reductions as unnecessary. A more aggressive warning 
note was struck by the Government resolutions pronouncing that the 
powers of the House of Lords in rejecting and delaying legislation ought 
to be restricted. 

In 1908 the party battle again waxed furious. The retirement and 



EPILOGUE 953 

death of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman removed a leader whose tact and 
management had during his term of office won for him an admiration and 
affection such as no one had previously looked for. His successor, Mr. 
Asquith, had been the acknowledged chief of the imperialist section of 
Liberals, and for the moment there were doubts whether the party would 
retain its solidarity under his captaincy. Very soon, however, it became 
apparent that there was to be no abatement in the Liberal demand for 
reforms. The reconstructions of the Cabinet gave an increased instead of 
diminished prominence to the more Radical element, while there was no 
sign that the so-called Whigs were at variance with their colleagues. 

The first measure was indeed hardly controversial, since Unionists even 
more than Liberals had been pledged to provide pensions for the aged 
poor so soon as the national revenue should be able to bear the burden. 
Such opposition as the Old Age Pension Bill met with was based on the 
argument that the money would be better applied to strengthening national 
defence, or else upon the view that the scheme ought to be contributory — 
that the pension should be a reward of thrift, not bestowed on the thrifty 
and thriftless alike. 

The Government returned to the attack on the Education question, a 
subject on which it was a sheer impossibility to take a popular line. The 
attempt was made to find a middle way which both denominationalists and 
undenominationalists could conscientiously accept. The proposal was that 
in areas where there was only one available school the regular religious 
instruction should be of the undenominational order, with facilities for 
denominational instruction to be given outside the school hours. But, in 
spite of prolonged negotiations, it was found to be impossible to arrive at 
any scheme which could command general assent, and the bill was after 
all withdrawn. 

Fiercer still was the controversy over a bill which was to reduce system-, 
atically the number of houses licensed to sell alcoholic beverages. In 
a period of fourteen years one-third of the existing licenses were to be 
extinguished, but compensation was to be provided by a fund levied from 
the trade itself. After the fourteen years it was to be recognised that 
the licence would be granted for one year only, carrying with it no sort 
of right to count upon its renewal. The whole energies of the licensed 
trade were devoted to a vehement campaign against the measure ; minis- 
terialists lost seats at several bye-elections ; the House of Lords were 
encouraged to believe that the Government had lost the confidence of 
the country and would be defeated in a general election, and the Peers 
rejected the bill. 

Still the Government, like its Unionists predecessor, refused to regard 

bye-elections as a proof that it ought to resign, or, still more positively, 

to admit the title of the House of Lords to force an appeal to the country. 

•In 1909 the gage of battle was flung down more emphatically than ever 

in the Budget introduced by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. 



954 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Lloyd George. The announcement that the naval programmes of foreign 
Powers necessitated an immensely increased expenditure on armaments 
met with an extremely reluctant assent from the economists in the Liberal 
ranks, while the programme put forward was stormily denounced as 
utterly insufficient by the Opposition. The Government stood to their 
view that their demands did not go beyond what was required by a reason- 
able prudence, but were at the same time adequate. 

But the increased expenditure demanded an increased revenue. The 
rejection of the last year's Licensing Bill was met by greatly increasing the 
cost of licenses ; thus the liquor traffic was to be laid under contribution. 
An increase of the duties on tobacco and on spirits would levy a contri- 
bution from the working man. Wealth was to contribute by an increase 
of the tax upon incomes exceeding ^5000 a year, and of the death duties. 
But above everything else a new tax was to be laid upon land by the 
appropriation of a portion of what is called the Unearned Increment; that 
is, the increased value of property brought about not by the action of the 
proprietors but by external circumstances — a scheme which involved an 
immense and complicated system of revaluation. The Budget, warmly 
applauded by Radicals who since the days of John Stuart Mill had claimed 
that the unearned increment was a fair and just source of taxation, was 
received with a storm of indignation by the landholders and the licensed 
trade. The House of Peers accepted the Government's challenge. It was 
admitted that they could not amend a money bill ; it was admitted, on the 
other hand, that they had the constitutional right to reject such a bill in 
its entirety. They acted upon their technical right, in spite of strong pro- 
tests from Lord Rosebery and others who detested the Budget itself, and 
threw out the Finance Bill. 

Ministers, then, were obliged either to remodel the Budget so as to make 
it acceptable to the Peers or else to appeal to the country. But the 
question was no longer one as to what were the constitutional powers 
technically possessed by the hereditary chamber ; now it was, whether 
it should be permitted to retain those powers. If the rejection of the 
Budget were to be accepted as a precedent, the Lords would at all times 
be able to force a dissolution. The Lords, it was argued, had ceased to 
exercise their proper function as an independent revising chamber, and had 
become simply an instrument of one party. While the Conservatives were 
in office they could legislate to their heart's content ; while Liberals were in 
office they could carry no legislation which did not command the assent of 
the Opposition. Ministers appealed to the country, with an emphatic 
declaration that no Liberal Government could in future remain in office until 
the powers of the Lords were so curtailed that finance should be removed 
entirely from their control, and that they should no longer be able to pre- 
vent the expressed will of the House of Commons from becoming law 
within the period of a single parliament. The general election was fought 
on the triple issue, the Budget, Tariff Reform, and the Abolition of the 



EPILOGUE 955 

Veto of the House of Lords. The result was a considerable increase in 
the number of Unionists, since many of the Free-Traders who had voted 
against them at the last election considered that in the choice of evils 
Tariff Reform was less dangerous than Mr. George's financial methods. 
Nevertheless the Unionists were still outnumbered by the Liberal party 
itself, while for practical purposes that party could count on the solid 
support of the Labour members and of the now thoroughly reunited Irish 
Nationalists. 

The advanced Radicals undoubtedly supposed that the first measure 
of the Government would be a bill abolishing the veto of the House of 
Lords, and that the king had given a guarantee that the Lords would, 
if necessary, be compelled to yield by an overwhelming creation of peers. 
There was some indignation when it was announced that the government 
of the country must be carried on and the Budget must be passed before 
anything else could be done. Resentment grew among the extremists 
when it became known that the guarantees had not been given, and that 
ministers would formulate their plan before seeking to obtain them. In 
the great crisis which had now arrived it was felt that everything turned 
upon the profound political sagacity of King Edward VII., a sagacity 
which had won universal recognition. But even at that momentous hour 
the hand of death fell. The strain of anxiety had broken the king's health. 
On May 5th men read with startled alarm the announcement that he 
was seriously ill. The next day bulletins announced that his condition 
was critical, and just before midnight he passed away. 

In South Africa after the treaty of 1902 British supremacy was no 
longer in question. Nevertheless the war appeared to have been only 
the culminating phase of a long period of racial antagonism. A very large 
proportion of the British in those regions were still naturally suspicious 
of the Dutch, and were strongly opposed to any early extension to them of 
real political power. In the view of Unionists at home, and of the former 
High Commissioner, Lord Milner, it was only by slow and tentative steps 
that it would become safe to place the Dutch colonies on an equality with 
the British. With the Liberals however it had become an axiom, a 
cardinal article of belief, that among the white races restrictions upon 
political liberty are a disintegrating factor ; that the loyalty of a people 
was to be won not by a cautious distrust but by a generous confidence, 
bestowed even at a considerable risk. The Liberals were no sooner in 
power than they resolved to take the risks in South Africa, and to bestow 
on the states with a mainly Boer population the full status of colonies 
with responsible government — it had not yet presented itself to the mind 
of any one that there was anything derogatory in the name of " Colony." 
Lord Milner's place had before this been taken by a prominent Unionist, 
Lord Selborne, who was nevertheless prepared loyally to give effect to 
the policy of the new Government. In spite of warning protests from the 
Opposition leaders, who declined to share the responsibility, Sir Henry 



956 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

Campbell-Bannerman took the risks, and conceded responsible self-govern- 
ment to the Boers who had so recently been engaged in a desperate struggle 
against the might of the Empire into which they were now incorporated. 
Whether the act was recklessly rash or courageously magnanimous, it was 
justified by the event, at least so far as the experience of seven years can 
justify the formation of a definite conclusion on the subject. It was not 
misinterpreted like the retrocession of 1881, and it converted a people with 
an emphatically hostile tradition into loyal citizens of the British Empire. 
How far antagonistic elements had been harmonised was seen when the South 

African dominions, after pro- 
longed deliberation, formulated a 
scheme for the federation of the 
Union of South Africa — like the 
Canadian and Australian groups 
— which was sanctioned by the 
imperial parliament in 1909. 

In India the vigorous vice- 
royalty of Lord Curzon continued 
to be productive of much con- 
troversy. Suspicions that Tibet 
was entering into dangerous re- 
lations with Russia led to de- 
mands for a treaty with that 
mysterious state, whose conduct 
necessitated a military expedition 
which was completely successful 
in achieving its objects. Native 
sentiment was greatly excited by 
the partition of the province of 
Bengal. The reasons for the 
excitement caused are not easily intelligible to any one who has not an 
intimate knowledge of Indian affairs. But the effect was to set on foot 
an agitation, not among the Mohammedans but among the Hindus of 
Bengal, which provided the Indian government with very grave problems 
of administration for at least five years to come. Lord Curzon's retire- 
ment, however, was brought about not by this but by very serious friction 
between the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener, in which 
the Unionist Government supported the latter. Lord Curzon's place was 
taken by Lord Minto, who, like Lord Selborne in Africa, found himself 
able to work in admirable harmony with Mr. John Morley, who became 
Secretary of State for India when the Liberals came into power. The 
agitation among the Hindus became so active, and the language of the 
native press so seditious, that there were loud outcries for severe repressive 
measures. Strong measures were, in fact, taken by Lord Minto and 
Mr. Morley, of a character much more drastic and arbitrary than could be 




British Possessions in Africa, 1903. 



' 



EPILOGUE 957 

dreamed of in dealing with the Press in England. They were accordingly 
condemned by all those persons who declined to recognise any warrant for 
applying different governmental principles in India and in England ; while 
they were condemned with equal vehemence by another school as far too 
lenient, and a virtual encouragement of sedition. The Indian Government, 
however, went on its way undisturbed by the attacks of either wing, and 
again its conduct appears to have been justified by the results. 

During the reign of King Edward VII. a remarkable change took place 




Mr. John Morley in 1894. 



in the relations between the United Kingdom and the European Powers. 
Almost unanimously Europe had accepted as undoubted facts the wildest 
of fabrications concerning the doings of the British in South Africa. 
Largely owing to the genial personality of the king himself, there was now 
a general disappearance of the prevalent sentiment of hostilit}\ Hitherto 
the two Powers with whom the dangers of collision had been most serious 
were Russia and France. Almost throughout the nineteenth century 
antagonism between the British Empire and Russia had been a dominating 
factor in politics, while ever since the British occupation of Egypt there 
had been perpetual friction between British and French. At an early stage 



9 5§ THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

of the great war between Russia and Japan, the extraordinary behaviour of 
a Russian squadron, bound for the Far East, in firing upon an innocent 
British fishing fleet, seemed almost to have made war inevitable. But the 
war was avoided, perhaps because of an unmistakable demonstration of the 
efficiency of the British Navy. The terrible disasters of the Russian 
struggle with Japan did much to dissipate the belief in Russian military 
power. The attitude of the two empires to each other became less sus- 
picious, and there was a new inclination on both sides to attain the adjust- 
ment of clashing interests in a spirit of goodwill. This took shape in the 
most marked manner when an agreement was arrived at as to the treat- 
ment of Persia, which on the whole had the approval of both parties in 
England. 

A visit of the king to Paris had an extraordinary effect in dissipating a 
popular French impression that British sentiment was actively hostile. An 
agreement with regard to Morocco and Egypt removed the most serious 
among the remaining causes of friction, and a spirit of warm friendship 
grew up between the two countries. Unhappily it has to be admitted that 
a less cordial spirit was engendered with another of the great Powers. 
The sudden determination of Germany in 1905 to develop a powerful navy 
aroused British alarm and suspicion ; while the increasing goodwill between 
Britain, France, and Russia developed among the Germans a belief that the 
British were pursuing a deliberate policy of isolating Germany with pre- 
sumably sinister intentions. The result was that each nation urged forward 
naval programmes manifestly with an eye to the suspected aggressive 
intentions of the other, while to each it appeared that the motive of the 
other was not self-defence but aggression. In well-informed quarters the 
idea that the German Emperor desired a war of aggression for the purpose 
of breaking up the British Empire was never credited ; but in both countries 
a portion of the Press persistently maintained an inflammatory tone which 
greatly increased the difficulty of attaining a mutual understanding. 



II 

1910-1912 

At the moment of the accession of King George V. the country was 
in the throes of an acute constitutional crisis. The general election had 
proved that in Great Britain, apart from Ireland, there was a large majority 
of the electorate which demanded a modification in the character of the 
House of Lords. From all quarters schemes were being propounded for 
the composition of an ideal Second Chamber, since it was admittedly un- 
satisfactory that such a chamber should by its constitution be the instru- 
ment of one party. In the view of the Government the curtailment of 
the powers of the House of Lords was the first question, though its settle- 






EPILOGUE 959 

ment would have to be followed in due course by a reconstruction of the 
chamber itself. To those, however, who regarded it as a primary necessity 
that the Second Chamber should act essentially as a barrier to the flood 
of democratic legislation, the great need seemed to be a reconstruction 
eliminating those elements which deprived its judgments of weight — the 
strengthening rather than the diminution of its authority. When the Lords 
made it clear that they would not accept the Government scheme except 
under compulsion, the Government resolved that the king should not be 
called upon to apply compulsion until the country had definitely pro- 
nounced its approval of the scheme itself. At the end of the year parlia- 
ment was dissolved, and the scheme was approved by a majority of the 
electorate practically identical with that which had returned the ministry 
to power in January. 

T^he Parliament Bill of 1911 left the composition of the Second 
Chamber untouched, while pronouncing that the reconstruction was re- 
quired. It touched the Commons only by reducing the life of a parlia- 
ment to five years instead of seven, the period set by the Septennial Act 
almost two hundred years ago. It dealt directly with the veto of the 
House of Lords. For the future the rejection by the House of Lords 
of a bill passed by the House of Commons was to be effective for two 
years. If at the end of the two years the House of Commons again passed 
the bill it was to become law, whether there had or had not been a 
dissolution in the interval. It was made known that the king had been 
advised and had agreed to create a sufficient number of peers to secure 
the Government majority in the event of the bill being rejected by the 
hereditary chamber. A section of the Peers were prepared to die fighting, 
to reject the bill and to throw upon the Government the onus of destroying 
the traditional character of the Peerage. The calmer counsels of the 
leaders of the party prevailed, and the Parliament Bill became law. But 
the constitution of the hereditary chamber remained unaltered, and the 
Unionists very expressly declared their intention of dealing with the 
question on their own lines whenever they should return to power. The 
Parliament Act, therefore, can only be regarded as a temporary settlement 
pending the reconstruction of the Second Chamber. 

That reconstruction the Government deferred in spite of the declarations 
of the Opposition that their doing so would be a breach of faith. Two 
other measures of constitutional importance were to take precedence 
of the next measure dealing with the House of Lords. One was to re- 
organise the distribution of votes among the electorate. This was to 
be effected in two ways, first by the abolition of plural voting, so that 
no one might vote in more than one constituency, secondly by reducing 
the term of residence necessary in order to enable a man to vote after 
changing his abode from one constituency to another. It was assumed 
oh all hands that by the first the Unionist vote in the electorate would 
be reduced, and by the second the Liberal vote would be increased on 



960 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

the hypothesis that many more of the shifting labouring population would 
be enabled to exercise the franchise. 

The other measure was a bill for conferring at once upon Ireland a 
legislature of her own, but upon lines compatible with the ultimate intro- 
duction of similar measures for Scotland, Wales, and England, while re- 
taining the supremacy of the imperial parliament. The presumed end in 




King George V. 
[After a photograph by Lafayette, Dublin.] 

view was the substitution of a federation of the four nationalities in place 
of the unitary system, giving self-government to each and a common central 
government to all, analogous to the systems already established in Canada, 
Australia, and South Africa. This scheme met with a fervid opposition 
from the Protestant division of Ulster which feared a Roman Catholic as- 
cendency. It was certain that the second if not the first of these two 
bills would only become law if the Liberals should still be in office at the 



EPILOGUE 961 

end of two years and should again pass the bill without regard to the 
House of Lords. 

The same expectation applied to a bill for the disestablishment of the 
Anglican Church in Wales, which followed generally the precedent of the 
disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland ; the theory in both 
cases being that an Established Church is warranted only while it is un- 
mistakably a National Church, whereas in Wales, as in Ireland, the majority 
of the population belonged to other communions. In both cases the 
opposition to disestablishment rested on the principle first that only through 
an Established Church can the state express its Christianity, and next that 
in any case the state has no right to appropriate ecclesiastical endowments 
which belong to the Church and not to the state. 

While the Government were shouldering the responsibility of introduc- 
ing a series of immense and far-reaching modifications in the constitution, 
they were zealous also in proceeding with the social legislation for ameli- 
orating the condition of the masses, of which the necessity was studiously 
affirmed by all parties in the state. Following up the bill for conferring 
old age pensions, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. George, introduced 
in 1911 a great scheme of National Insurance for wage-earners. Since a 
scheme for national insurance was in theory eminently desirable, all parties 
declared themselves ready to extend a provisional welcome to the bill ; but 
any scheme would of necessity be exceedingly complicated, while in the 
nature of the case only a very limited number of persons in the country 
could be capable of forming a competent judgment on its financial soundness. 
There were moreover three fundamental questions on which the widest 
divergency of opinion was possible. Should such a scheme be compulsory ? 
To what classes of the community should it apply ? Should the whole 
cost be borne by the state, or should employers contribute, or should em- 
ployees contribute as well ? The Government decided that it should be 
compulsory, inclusive, and contributory. Consequently every detail of the 
bill met with strong opposition from one quarter or another, while almost 
the entire medical profession proclaimed that the medical benefits could 
not be provided at the scale of payment to which the Government declared 
themselves limited by the financial conditions. From the outset it was 
evident that the measure would not be popular ; since the classes for whose 
benefit it was interided resented its contributory character, which would 
touch their pockets immediately, while only a prolonged experience would 
enable them to realise such benefits as they would obtain in exchange. 
Nevertheless the bill was carried and came into operation during 19 12. 
The old Chartist demand for payment of members of parliament was 
at last realised by the provision of an annual stipend of ^400. 

Meanwhile the new unionism had been gaining ground among the 
working classes. The leaders of the movement would appear to have had 
the double aim of consolidating a Socialist vote in parliament, and of co- 
ordinating aggressive action on the part of trade unions, so that the battle 

3 ? 



962 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

should no longer be between isolated employers and their dissatisfied em- 
ployees, but that the whole forces of associated trades should be brought to 
bear to force the whole body of employers to accept the men's demands. 
A series of great trade disputes were adjusted by the disputants' acceptance 
of the mediation of the Board of Trade and the arrangement of com- 
promises between masters and men. But in 191 1 it began to be realised 
that in certain cases the general public as well as the particular antagonists 
were materially affected by the disputes. This began to be brought home 
by a strike of the railway men in the summer of that year, when it became 
evident that in certain employments a cessation of work might paralyse in- 
dustries other than the one directly affected. Still more impressive was the 
great coal strike at the beginning of 191 2, followed as the spring was passing 
into summer by a strike of transport workers. The public supply of fuel 
was cut off by one, and its supply of food was in danger of being cut off 
by the other. There was a general acquiescence in the principle that 
masters and men should be left to fight out their own private battles ; but 
it began to be very seriously questioned whether that principle could be 
applied when those private battles threw out of work businesses which had 
no means of protecting themselves, and reduced the supply of the necessities 
of life for the general public. In the two former cases named the action of 
the Government brought the disputes to a close for the time being. In the 
third, Government merely tendered advice which was not accepted, and 
the strife was left to work itself out. In all three cases there was a com- 
mendable absence of disorder of the kind which is apt to accompany 
extensive trade disputes ; but the successful treatment of two particular 
emergencies was not a solution of the questions which lay at the root of 
those emergencies, and ministers before long felt it necessary to pledge 
themselves to introduce legislation, probably on the lines of compulsory 
arbitration. 

Outside the British Isles, but within the Empire, the most notable 
event was the visit of the king and queen to India. In that great depend- 
ency, what may be called the concluding act of the regime of Lord Morley 
and Lord Minto was the admission of natives of India to a larger share 
in the executive councils both of the central government and of the pre- 
sidencies. The continuity of their policy was maintained by their successors, 
Lord Crewe at the India Office and Lord Hardinge in the vice-royalty. 
The disaffection which at one time seemed so threatening ceased to be pro- 
minently active, and the presence of the Emperor of India in the Peninsula 
appealed forcibly to the imagination of the natives, giving rise to very en- 
couraging demonstrations of loyalty. The visit was signalised by the an- 
nouncement that the ancient capital of the Moguls, and of imperial dynasties 
long before the Moguls, the city of Delhi, was to be restored to its old 
position. 

On the subject of relations with the European Powers only a few words 
can be added. Russia, formerly feared as an aggressive military power, 



EPILOGUE 9 6 3 

when she was the special object of imperialist denunciation, had become 
instead the special aversion of advanced Radicals, chiefly because of the 
tyrannical methods of her domestic administration. She now adopted a 




.dictatorial attitude towards the Persian government, which appeared to be 
in contravention of the recent agreements, and it was chiefly from Radical 
quarters that the diplomacy of the British Government was denounced for 



964 THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE 

weakness in seeking to preserve friendly relations with a reactionary power 
at the expense of a helpless nation. 

In 19 1 1 there was a moment of intense anxiety when it appeared that 
relations with Germany had been strained almost to the breaking-point. A 
war between France and Germany seemed almost inevitable, the subject of 
contention being Morocco, until it became generally understood that in 
certain eventualities Great Britain would feel herself bound to give France 
effective support. Although the quarrel was adjusted before the public 
realised how great had been the danger of a general conflagration, in 
certain quarters in Germany the British attitude was resented ; but the 
Governments both of Britain and Germany directed determined efforts to 
attaining a better understanding between the British and German nations. 
While the presence of chauvinistic elements made it impossible to view the 
European situation without grave anxiety, there were signs that the common 
sense of both nations would triumph, that the tension would be relaxed, 
and that mutual suspicions would gradually pass away. 

Here our history closes, at a moment when solutions had been offered 
of two critical constitutional questions, and of one critical international 
question, while it would be rash to say that any one of the three had been 
definitively solved. At the same moment the industrial question appeared 
also to be reaching a critical point, and of that question it cannot be said 
as yet that any solution holds the field. This, however, may be said, that 
the British people has shown during these crises a temper, a power of self- 
control, and a disregard for inflammatory rhetoric, in which lies the best 
augury for the future. 



INDEX 



Abbott, Archbishop, 408 

Abdul Hamid , Sultan of Turkey , 903 

Abdur Rahman, Amir of Kabul, 

907, 908, 919 
Aberconway, treaty of, 124 
Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, defeats 

the French in Egypt, 735-736 
Aberdeen captured by Montrose, 

433 
Aberdeen, Lord, 831 ; coalition 

ministry of, 857 
Abhorrers, 483 

Aboukir Bay, battle of, 732-733 
Absenteeism, 689, 691 
Abyssinia, expedition of 1868, 887 
Acadia, expulsion of the French 

from, 615 
Aclea (Ockley or Oakley), battle 

of, 17 
Acre, siege of, 734 
Addington, Henry, Prime Minister, 
737; fall of, 745. See also Sid- 
mouth 
Addison, Joseph, 703 
Addled Parliament, the, 391 
Adrian IV. , Pope, 90 
" Adullamites," the, 884 
^Elfgar, Earl of East Anglia, 32, 

33, 34 
^Elfthryth, 26 

/Ethelbald, King of Mercia, 14 
/Ethelbald, King of Wessex, 17 
^Ethelbert, King of Kent, 11, 12 
^Ethelbert, King of Wessex, 17 
yEthelfiaed, the Lady of Mercia, 22 
^Ethelfrith, King of Northumbria, 

n 
^Ethelgifu, evil influence of, 25 
^Ethelred, King of Wessex, 17 ; 
defeated bv the Danes at Basing , 
18 
^Ethelred the Redeless or Un- 
ready, 26, 28 
^Ethelric, King of Northumbria, 11 
^Ethelric of Deira dethroned, 12 
^Ethelstan, 17 

yEthelstan, King of England, 23-24 
^Ethelwulf, King of Wessex,' 17 
Afghanistan, diplomatic relations 
with, 765 ; first war, 845-846, 
887, 904, 905 ; second war with, 
906 ; the Penjdeh incident, 919 ; 
frontiers defined, 928 
Africa, partition of, 929 
Africa, South, 799, 841, 908-911 ; 
first Boer War, 9x1-913; the 
Jameson Raid and Second Boer 
War, 930-939, 955 ; Union of, 

9S 6 
Agincourt, battle of, 195-196 
Agra, 868 
Agrarian troubles during minority 

of Edward VI., 301, 302; strife 

in Ireland, 689, 832-835 



Agricola marches through Scot- 
land, 2 

Agricultural Holdings ' Act, the, 
901, 927 

Agricultural Rating Act, the, 944 

Agriculture, 45, 47 ; labourers, 
173 ; progress of, 219 ; during 
the Middle Ages, 233, 235 ; dur- 
ing reign of Elizabeth, 375 ; 535 ; 
eighteenth century, 695-697, 
779; protection of, 784, 803-805 

Ahmed Khel, battle of, 907 

Ahmed Shah, 655, 675 

Aidan, King of Scots, defeated by 
^Ethelfrith, 11 

Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 597 

Alabama claims, the, 881, 899- 
900 

Alam Bagh, 871 

Alaskan seal fishery dispute, the, 
929 

Albany, Duke of, Regent of Scot- 
land, 288 

Albany, Murdach, Duke of, Regent 
of Scotland, 223 

Albany, Robert, Duke of, Regent 
of Scotland, 222 ; alliance with 
France, 223 

Alberoni, Cardinal, machinations 
of, 576 

Albuera, battle of, 759 

Alcuin, 14 

Alexander I., King of Scotland, 
78 

Alexander II., King of Scotland, 

ii5 

Alexander III., King of Scotland, 
115, 127, 132 

Alexander VI., Pope, 253; base- 
ness of, 270 

Alexander I. , Tsar of Russia, 735, 
751 ; and the Holy Alliance, 776, 
777-778 

Alexandria, siege of, 736 ; bom- 
bardment of, 915 

Alfred the Great, 17 ; defeated at 
Wilton, 18 ; forms nucleus of a 
Navy, 18 ; defeats Danes at 
Ethandune, 19 ; captures Lon- 
don, 19 ; genius and character 
of, 20; treaty with the Danes, 
22 ; inventor of trial by jury, 43, 
44 ; literary work of, 49 

Aliwal, battle of, 849 

Allahabad, 868 

Allectus, 4 

Alma, battle of the, 860 

Almanza, battle of, 561 

Almarez, 761 

Almeida, siege of, 759 

Alsace and Lorraine lost by 
France, 893 

Althorp, Lord, 791 ; sponsor of the 
First Factory Act, 817, 819 
965 



America, 591 ; Anglo-French strug- 
gle for, 612, 615 ; resistance to 
Grenville's policy, 643-646 ; re- 
sistance to Townshend's taxes, 
651 ; estrangement of, 658-661 ; 
the War of Independence, 661- 
673 ; confederation of states, 667 

America, United States of, the, 
721-722; war with, 766; Civil 
War in, 880-882, 929 

Amherst, Lord, captures Louis- 
bourg, 624 

Amherst, Lord, Governor-General 
of India, 796-797 

"Amicable Loan" proposed by 
Wolsey, 268 

Amiens, Mise of, 105 

Amiens, Peace of, the, 724 ; treaty 
of, the, 737, 743 

Amin Chand, 631 

Amirs, Napier's quarrel with the, 
847 

Anarchy among the Britons, 8, 
11 

Ancrum Moor, battle of, 295 

Andre\ Major, captured and exe- 
cuted by the Americans, 671 

Angles settle in Britain, 6-8 

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 6, 11, 17, 
23. 37. 49. 236 

Anglo-Saxon polity, 38-47 

Angus, Earl of, Archibald " Bell- 
the-Cat," treasons against James 
III. and IV. of Scotland, 260, 
288 

Anjou, Counts of, 71 

Anlaf or Olaf, Norse leader, 23 

Annates Act, the, 281 

Anne of Cleves married to Henry 
VIII., 286 

Anne, Queen, reign of, 554-570 

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
69, 71, 72 

Anson, Commodore, 593, 596 

Anti-Corn-Law League, the, 820, 
821, 823 

Antoinette, Marie, execution of, 

725 
Antoninus, Wall of, 2 
Anwar-ud-Din, 604, 605 
Appellant, the Lords, 180, 181 
Apprentices, Statute of, 375, 535, 

816 
Appropriation of supplies, 165, 472 
Arabi Pasha resists European con- 
trol of Egypt, 915 
Arakan, annexation of, 797 
Archers, the English, 48, 76, 125 ; 
superseded by use of gunpowder, 

234 

Architecture of the Middle Ages, 

236 
Arcot, capture and defence of by 

Clive, 606-607, 864 



9 66 



Argyle, Archibald, Earl of, 433, 
436, 440 ; execution of, 485 

Argyle, Archibald, Marquis of, 
rebellion and execution of, 493 

Argyle, John, Duke of, 570; op- 
poses Mar at Sheriffmuir, 573 

Argyle, Duke of, 911 ; retires from 
the Gladstone Ministry, 914 

Aristocracy, Anglo-Saxon, 39 

Arkwright, Richard, inventor of 
the water-driven spinning-jenny, 
698 

Arlington, member of the Cabal, 

474 
Armada, the Spanish, 346-350, 

352 

Armed Neutrality, the, 671, 735 

Armenia, Turkish massacres in, 
940 

Armour, obsolescence of, 234 

Arms, Assize of, 82, 88 

Army, Standing, beginnings of, 468 ; 
reorganisation of, 899 ; Haldane's 
reforms, 952 

Ami, battle of, 607 

Arnold, Benedict, 663, 671 

Arnold, Matthew, 888 

Arran, Earls of, 289 

Arran, Earl of, 355 

Arras, Conference at, between the 
English and French, 200 

Art of the Middle Ages, 236 

Arthur, King, 6 

Arthur of Brittany defeated by 
John, 94 

Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of 
Henry VII., married to Katha- 
rine of Aragon, 247 

Articles, Lords of the, 186, 415 

Articuli super Cartas, 132 

Arts, industrial, introduction of, 
169 

Arundel, Archbishop, 182 

Arundel, Earl of, 181 

Aryans, the, 4 

Asaf ud-Daulah, 680 

Ashanti, expedition of 1864, the, 
878; second, 900 

Ashbourne's Act, Lord, 919, 924 

Ashdown, Saxon victory at, 18 

Ashley. See Shaftesbury 

Aske, Robert, leader of the Pilgri- 
mage of Grace, 285 ; execution of, 
286 

Assam, annexation of, 797 

Assandun, battle of, 28 

Assize of Arms, 82, 88 ; of North- 
ampton, 86 

"Association," the, 342 

Asquith , Herbert H. , Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, 952 ; Prime Min- 
ister, 953 

Attacotti, 4 

Attainder, Acts of, 208, 209, 217, 

524 

Auckland, Lord, Governor-General 
of India, 845, 846 

Auerstadt, battle of, 750 

Augsburg, Interim of, 300 

Augustine introduces Latin Chris- 
tianity, 11 

Aurangzib, Emperor, 537 

Aurangzib dynasty of India, the, 
603 

Aurelianus, Ambrosius, 6, 8 

Austerlitz, battle of, 749 



INDEX 

Australia, 722 ; colonisation of, 799- 
800 ; constitution and govern- 
ment of, under Victoria, 838-840 ; 
discovery of gold in, 839 ; Com- 
monwealth of, 945 

Austria, British alliance with, 614 ; 
French Republic's war with, 724 ; 
successes of, against the French 
Republic, 728 ; makes treaty of 
Campo Formio with Napoleon, 
730 ; joins second coalition 
against Napoleon, 734, 735, 827 ; 
intervention of, in the Crimea, 
859; and Northern Italy, 879; 
rivalry with Prussia, 892-893 

Austrian Succession, War of the, 
590. 593 

Ayslabie, Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer, disgraced, 581 

Azores, Sir Richard Grenville's en- 
gagement with the Spanish fleet 
off the, 352 

Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam, 
354, 382, 394 ; impeachment, 395 
Bacon, Nicholas, 354 
Bacon, Roger, the father of modern 

science, 235 
Badajoz, siege of, 759, 760 
Baden-Powell, Sir Robert, defender 

of Mafeking, 935 
Badon, Mount, battle of, 6, 8 
Bagsceg attacks Wessex, 18 
Bahamas, colonisation of, 533 
Balaclava, 860, 861 
" Balance of Power," the, 231, 613 
Balance of Trade, 372 
Balfour, Arthur James, Chief Secre- 
tary for Ireland, 923, 924 ; Prime 
Minister, 945 
Balkan States, revolt of, 903 
Ball, John, the Lollard, 177 
Balliol, Edward, wins Scottish 
crown, 151 ; deposed, 152 ; at- 
tempts to regain Scottish crown, 
185 
Balliol, John, 127, 133-134, 136 
Ballot, introduction of the, 899 
Balmerino, Lord, imprisonment of, 

419 
Baltic, the battle of the, 735 
Bank of England, foundation of, 
543 ; the goldsmiths' attempt to 
ruin, 543, 578 ; the run on, 730 
Bannockburn, battle of, 143 
Barbour, Bishop, his poem The 

Bruce, 238 
Barclay's plot against William III., 

S23 

Barebones Parliament, the, 454 

Barham, Lord, 745 

Baring, Major Evelyn. See Cro- 
mer, Lord 

Barlow, Sir George, Governor- 
General of India, 765 

Barnet, Yorkist victory at, 212 

Baronets, origin of, 391 

Barons, the, revolt against William 
I., 54, 66; under Henry II., 87 ; 
refuse to fight for John, 95 ; re- 
sistance to John, 96, 97, 98 ; the, 
and Henry III. , 102, 103, 104, 
117, 120, 130, 135, 136 ; and 
Edward II. , 142, 146 ; and Ed- 
ward III. , 172 ; position of, under 
Henry VI., 206; power of, 



broken, 219 ; resistance of, to 

absolutism, 232 ; decline of the 

power of, 364 
Bartholomew, St., massacre of, 324, 

328 
Basing, Danish victory at, 18 
Basing Hall, Royalist defence of, 

437 

Basle, treaty of, 728 

Bastille, storming of the, 715 

Batavian Republic (Holland), 728 

Bate's Case, 390, 401 

Bauge, battle of, 198 ; Scots at, 223 

Bavaria, 756 

Bavaria, Charles, Elector of, claims 
Austrian Empire, 593 

Baylen, capitulation of, 753 

Beachy Head, French victory over 
English and Dutch fleets off, 511 

Beaconsfield, Lord, administration 
of, 901-905 ; death of, 914. See 
also Disraeli 

Beaton, Cardinal, 290, 294 ; assassi- 
nation of, 295, 296 

Beaufort, Henry, Cardinal, Bishop 
of Winchester, becomes Chan- 
cellor, 202 

Beauforts, the, descendants of! John 
of Gaunt, 202 

Becket, Thomas, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, 82 ; becomes Chan- 
cellor, 82 ; opposes the king, 83, 
84 ; murder of, 85, no 

Bedchamber Question, the, 822 

Bede, Venerable, 6, 7, II, 14, 49 

Bedford, John, Duke of, Regent of 
France, 198, 200 

Bedford, Russell, Duke of, minister 
of George III., 641 

Begums of Oudh, the, 680, 681 

Belle He, capture of, 638 

Bellingham, Sir Edward, Deputy- 
Lieutenant of Ireland, 302, 330 

Benares, acquisition of, by Hast- 
ings, 679 

Benefit of Clergy, 85 

Benevolences invented by Edward 
IV., 213; resorted to by Henry 
VII., 251; demanded by James 
L, 396 

Beresford, General, 759 

Bengal, Hastings's adminiflration 
in, 680; under Lord Cornwallis, 
720-721 ; partition of, 956 

Bentinck. See Portland, Duke of 

Bentinck, Lord George, 826 

Bentinck, Lord William, Governor- 
General of India, 797 

Beorn , Earl, murder of, 32 

Beornwulf, King of Mercia, invades 
Wessex, 15 

Beowulf, 49, 236 

Berkeley, Bishop, 705 

Berlin Congress, the, 904 

Berlin Decree, Napoleon's, 751 

Bermudas, colonisation of, 533 

Bernicia, kingdom of, n 

Bernicia, 69 

Berwick, massacre of, 134 ; fall of, 
144 ; captured by the Scots, 

159 
Berwick, Duke of, commands 

French forces at Almanza, 561 
Bhartpur, hostilities with, 797 
Bhonsla, the, 676, 678, 680, 736, 

764. 795 



Bible, ths, William Tyndale's 
translation of, 378 ; authorised 
version, 378 

Bigod, Roger, Earl of Norfolk, 138 

Bishops, ejection of, under Eliza- 
beth, 317 

Bishops restored to the House of 
Lords, 470 

Bishops' Book, the, 286 

Bishops' War, the, 420 

Bismarck, Prince, 892-894 

Black Death, the, 174-179, 219 

Black Hole of Calcutta, the, 620, 
630 

Black Sea Treaty, 899 

Blackwater, battle of, 359 

Blackwood' s Magazine, 811 

Bladensburg, battle of, 766 

Blake, Admiral, 449, 451, 461 

Blenheim, battle of, 553 

Bloemfontein Conference, the, 933 

Blood feud, the, 44 

" Bloody Assize," the, 493 

Blorfe Heath, battle of, 208 

Blucher, Marshal, 769-771 

Bocland, 46 

Boers, the, 799, 842-843 ; disputes 
with the, 908 

Boer War, 1880, 911 ; second, 

930-939 
Boleyn, Anne, 275, 276; married 

to Henry VIII., 280; execution 

of, 286 
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 

Lord, 555, 563, 566; intrigues 

with the Jacobites, 569 ; joins the 

Pretender, 572 
Bombay, 676, 678 
Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of 

Canterbury, 104 
Boniface VIII. , Pope, 129 
Bonner, Bishop, imprisonment of, 

299 ; deprived of his see, 304 ; 

persecution of Protestants, 311 
Bordars, 65 
Border raids, 292 
Borodino, battle of, 762 
Boroughs, 23 ; development of, 

in, 140; creation of councils, 

926; London, 944 
Boscawen, Admiral, attacks Pondi- 

chery, 605, 624, 625 
Bosnia, revolt of, 903 
Boston "massacre," the, and "tea 

riots," 658-659 
Boswell, James, 705 
Bosworth, battle of, 218 
Botany Bay, convict settlement of, 

722 
Bothwell, James, Earl of, 322 ; 

marries Mary Queen of Scots, 324 
Bothwell Brig, battle of, 487 
Boulogne captured by Henry 

VIII., 295 ; surrender of, 305 
Bourbons, the, 588-590, 667 ; the 

struggles with, 672, 714 ; restora- 
tion of, in France, 767 
Bouvines, battle of, 98 
Bow, the, use of, by the English, 

48 
Bowring, Sir John, 863 
Boycott, Captain, 913 
Boyle, Robert, 548 
Boyne, battle of the, 511 
Braddock, General, defeat of, 615 
Bradford, John, martyr, 311 



INDEX 

Bramham Moor, battle of, 189 
Brand, President of Orange Free 

State, 909, 912 
Brandywine Creek, battle of, 665 
Breda, declaration of, 465 ; treaty 

of, 472, 534 
Brest, battle of, 522 ; blockade of, 

625, 729 
Bretigny, treaty of, 160 
Bretwalda, 16 
Brian Boroimhe defeats Danes at 

Clontarf, 89 
Bridgewater, Duke of, pioneer of 

the canal system, 699 
Brigantes, repression of, 2 
Brigham, treaty of, 133 
Brihuega, surprise and capture of 

Stanhope's force at, 564 
Brindley, James, engineer of the 

Worsley-Manchester canal, 699 
Bristol, in 

Bristol merchants, maritime activ- 
ity of, 253 
Britain, early inhabitants of, 1 ; 

Roman occupation of, 2 ; dialects 

of, 2 ; Roman evacuation of, 4 
British North America Act, 888 
Brittany, 156 

' ' Broad - Bottomed " Administra- 
tion, the, 608 
Bronkhorst Spruit, battle of, 911 
Brougham, Henry, Lord, 779, 

791 
Brown, John, martyrdom of, 513 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 545 
Browning, Robert, 856 
Brownists, 371 ; emigrate to Hol- 
land, 372 
Bruce, Edward, 142 ; accepts offer 

of Irish crown, 145 
Bruce, Robert, 128, 133 ; wins 

Scottish crown, 136-138, 141 ; 

death of, 144 
Bruce, General, 679 
Brunanburh, battle of, 23 
Brut, poem of Layamon, 236 
Brythonic invasion, 1 
Buckingham, Edward Stafford, 

Duke of, condemnea for treason 

against Henry VIII., 266 
Buckingham, George Villiers, 

Duke of, favourite of James I. 

and Charles I., 394, 397-399, 

401 ; murder of, 404 
Buckingham, George Villiers (2), 

Duke of, 474, 479 
Buckingham, Henry Stafford, Duke 

of, insurrection against Richard 

III., 216-217 
Budget, Liberal, of 1909 rejected 

by the Lords, 954 
Buenos Ayres, expedition to, 750 
Building, great expenditure on, in 

fifteenth century, 221 
Bulgaria, revolt of, 903 
Buller, General Sir Redvers, as- 
sumes chief command in South 

Africa, 935 
Bulowal, battle of, 849 
Bunker's Hill, battle of, 661 
Bunyan, John, 544 
Buonaparte, Jerome, made King of 

Westphalia, 752, 772 
Buonaparte, Joseph, made King of 

Naples, 750; of Spain, 753, 

762 



967 



Buonaparte, Louis, made King of 
Holland, 750 ; deposed by Na- 
poleon, 756 

Buonaparte, Napoleon. See Napo- 
leon I. 

Burgh, Hubert de, justiciar, 100, 
101, 102 

Burghs. See Boroughs 

Burgoyne, General, 664 ; surrenders 
at Saratoga, 665 

Burgundy, Philip, Duke of, makes 
truce with Henry V., 198 

Burgundy, Philip, Duke of, 210 

Burh, the, 47 

Burke, Edmund, 648, 653, 684 ; 
introduces his Economic Reform 
Bill, 684, 705 ; denounces the 
French Revolution, 714 

Burleigh, Lord, 351 ; death of, 353 

Burleigh, William Cecil, Lord, 
minister of Elizabeth, 315, 317, 
3*9> 3 2 S. 344. 35i ! character of, 
353-354 

Burmah, Amherst's war with, 796- 
797 ; annexation of Upper, 864 ; 
annexation of Lower, 928 

Burnell, Robert, Chancellor, 119 

Burns, Robert, 809 

Burnt Candlemas, the, 159 

Burrard, Sir Harry, 754, 755 

Busaco, battle of, 759 

Bussy, M. de, 606, 608 

Bute, John, Earl of, chief adviser 
of George III., 637; Prime 
Minister, 638-640 ; resignation, 
641 

Butler, Sir William, views on the 
situation in South Africa, 933 

Buxar, battle of, 657 

Bye Plot, the, against James I., 
386, 387 

Byng, Admiral, defeats Spanish 
fleet off Cape Passaro, 577, 617; 
execution of, 618 

Byron, Lord, 787, 811 

Cabal, the, 474 

Cable, the first submarine, 853 

Cabot, John and Sebastian, 253 

Cade, Jack, rebellion of, 205, 802 

Cadiz, Drake's expedition to, 347; 
taken by Howard and Essex, 
352 ; Buckingham's expedition 
to, 398 ; Sir George Rooke's ex- 
pedition to, 552 

Caedmon, 49, 236 

Caermarthen, Marquis of. See 
Dan by 

Caesar, Julius, invades Britain, 1 

Csesarism in France, 776 

Cairns, Lord, 895 

Cairo, occupation of, 915 

Calais, siege of, 158 ; treaty of, 
160 ; loss of, by Mary I., 313 

Calcutta, 603 ; the Black Hole of 
620, 630 

Calder, Admiral, 746 

Calendar, reform of the, 610 

Calvinism, 406, 415 

Cambridge, Adolphus, Duke of, 781 

Cambridge, Richard, Earl of, con- 
spiracy of, against Henry V., 194, 
203 

Cambuskenneth, battle of, 135 

Camden, Lord, Viceroy of Ireland, 
739 



9 68 



Cameronians, the, 487 

Campbell, Sir Colin, Commander- 
in-Chief in India, 871 

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 
leader of the Liberal Party, 945 ; 
administration of, 951-953 ; death 

of. 953 
Camperdown, battle of, 730 
Campian, Robert, the Jesuit, 339 
Campo Formio, treaty of, 730 
Canada, English and French 
strugglefor,534 ; Frenchcolonists 
in, 612; Anglo-French struggle 
for, 622, 624, 626-629, 640, 659 ; 
invasion of, by Americans, 663 ; 
the Canada Act, 722 ; American 
invasion of, 766 ; affairs of (1815- 
1832), 799-800; discontent in, 
836 ; Act of Reunion of, 837 ; Do- 
minion of, 888 
Canal system, origin of, 699 
Canning, George, Foreign Secretary , 
752 ; resigns, 758, 761 ; policy of, 
782-783, 786; becomes Prime 
Minister, 786 ; death of, 787, 795 
Canning, Lord, Governor-General 
of India, 868,872 ; becomes Vice- 
roy, 872 ; 887 
Canons, Book of, Scottish, 419 
Canton, capture of, 872 
Cape Colony, 737 ; reoccupation 
of, 750, 775 ; Dutch settlers in, 
841, 844 
" Cape to Cairo" project of Cecil 

Rhodes, 931 
Capital and labour, relations of 
during eighteenth century, 695 ; 
antagonism of, 802 ; conflicts, 

853-854. 948 
Capitalism, beginning of, 220 
Carausius, 4 
Carham, battle of, 30 
Carleton, Sir Guy, author of the 

Quebec Act, 659, 664 
Carlyle, Thomas, 856, 888 
Carnarvon, Lord, 909 
Carnatic, the, 678, 764 
Carnot, Lazare N. M., French 

statesman, 726 
Carolinas, colonisation of, 534 
Caroline, Queen, 584 
Caroline of Brunswick, wife of 

George IV., 781 
Cartagena, repulse of British fleet 

at, 592 
Carteret, George Granville, Lord, 

586 ; minister for foreign affairs, 

594. 608 
" Cartridge Incident," the, 866, 868 
Cartwright, Edmund, inventor of 

the power-loom, 698 
Casket Letters, the, 326 
Castillon, English defeat at, 207 
Castlebar, Race of, 741 
Castlereagh , Lord, 742, 758 ; For- 
eign Secretary, 761, 767; policy 

of, 778 ; suicide of, 782 
Castles, 66 

Cateau Cambre^is, treaty of, 316 
Catherine " Bar-lass, 1 ' 224 
Catherine, Tsarina, aggression of, 

713. 733 
Catherine de Medicis, 319, 321 
Catholic Association, the, 789 
Catholic Emancipation, 737, 750, 

786, 7S9-790 



INDEX 

Catholic Relief Act, 683; Ireland, 

692 
Cato Street Conspiracy, the, 780 
Cavagnari, Sir Louis, 907 
Cavendish, Lord Frederick, murder 

of, 915 
Cavour, Count, 878, 880 
Cawnpore, massacre of, 868-870 
Caxton, William, 214, 240 
Ceawlin, King of Wessex, 11, 12 

Cecil. See Burleigh and Salisbury 

Celts, 1-6, to 

Ceolvvulf, King of Mercia, deposed 

by Beornwulf, 15 
Ceorls, 39, 43, 46, 48, 55, 64 
Ccrdic, 9 ; house of, 35 
Cetewayo, King of the Zulus, 908 
Ceylon, 737; acquired by Britain, 

775 
Chamberlain, Joseph, 911, 921, 925 ; 
Colonial Minister, 930; adopts 
Protection, 949 
Chamberlain, Sir Neville, 906 
Chanda Sahib, 605, 606, 607 
Chandernagur, 603 ; captured by 

Clive, 621, 631 
Chaplin, Walter, champion of pro- 
tection for agriculture, 951 
Charles I., accession of, 397; marries 
Henrietta Maria, 397 ; arouses 
antagonism in Scotland, 418 ; 
surrender and imprisonment of, 
437 ; renews hostilities, 441 ; trial 
and execution of, 444 ; 
Charles II. accepts the Solemn 
League and Covenant, 448 ; ac- 
cession of, 465 ; character of, 467 ; 
foreign policy of, 471 ; marries 
Catherine of Braganza, 471 ; war 
with the Dutch, 472 ; secret treaty 
with Louis XIV. of France, 476 ; 
religious policy of, 476-477; in- 
trigues with Louis XIV. of 
France, 479, 483 ; policy of, 488 ; 
death of, 490; founder of the 
Royal Society, 548 
Charles V., Emperor, alliance of, 

with Henry VIII. , 265, 300 
Charles VI., Emperor, 590, 593 
Charles IV. , King of France, 149 
Charles V., King of France, 161 
Charles X. of France, abdication of, 

791 
Charles IV. of Spain, abdication of, 

753 
Charles XII. of Sweden, 561 
Charles, Archduke of Austria, 

defeats General Jourdan , 728 
' ' Charlies " superseded by police- 
men, 784 
Charmouth, battle of, 17 
Charter of Henry I., 98 
Charter, the Forest, 131 
Charter, the Great, 99, 101, 120, 

126, 131 
Charter, the People's, 853 
Chartered Company, South Africa, 

the, 931 
Charters, municipal, 95, 112 
Chartists, the, 820, 821, 823, 824, 

827, 854 
Chatham, Earl of. See Pitt 
Chatham, Earl of, commander of 

military in Walcheren expedition, 

758 



Chaucer, Geoffrey, 238 
Chelmsford, Lord, Commander-in- 
Chief in Zulu War, 910 
Cheriton, battle of, 432 
Chesapeake and Shannon, duel cf, 

766 
Chester, battle of, 10, n ; Fenian 

plot at, 886 
Chesterfield, Lord, 588, 610 
Chevy Chace, ballad of, 187 
Cheyte Singh, deposition of, 680 
Chillianwalla, battle of, 851 
China, war with, 863, 872, 877 ; 
war with Japan , 940 ; Boxer 
rising, 943 
Chinese labour in South Africa, 

• 95i 

Chippenham, Peace of, 19 

Choiseul, Duke of, plans invasion 
of England, 625 ; negotiations 
with William Pitt, 628 

Christianity in Britain, 4 ; spread 
of, n-12 

Church, the, 13-14, 40; and State, 
relations of, 55 ; under William 
I., 57-58, 79, 82, 109; under 
Edward I., 121, 129; and Com- 
mons under Henry IV. , 190 ; 
during the Middle Ages, 226, 
228 ; organisation of, in England, 
232 ; degraded state cf, at time 
of the Reformation, 270 ; and the 
Reformation, 299-301 ; Protector 
Somerset's dealings with, 302- 
303 ; during the Tudor period, 
367-372 ; 855 

Church of Ireland, 831, 832 

Churchill, John. See Marlborough 

Churchill, Lord Randolph, resigna- 
tion of, 925 

Cintra, Convention of, 755 

Circumspecte Agatis, royal ordi- 
nance, 121 

Ciudad Rodrigo, 759, 760 

Civil List, the, 779 

Civil War, the, 428-444 

Clanship, 40, 41 

Clare, Earl of, 739 

Clarendon, Assize of, 88 

Clarendon Cede, 470 

Clarendon, Constitutions of, 83 

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 
chief adviser of Charles II., 469 ; 
fall of, 473 

Clarendon, Lord, Foreign Secre- 
tary, 858, 862, 872 

Clarence, George, Duke of, arraign- 
ment and death of, 214-215 

Class war, 802-807 

Claudius, Emperor, annexes Brit- 
ain, 2 

Claverhouse, John Graham of, 
Viscount Dundee, 487, 488, 514 

Clavering, General, 676 

Clement VII., Pope, and Henry 
VIII. , 276 

Clergy, celibacy of, 58 

Clergy, the, and Edward I., 129- 
131 ; relations of Henry VIII. 
with, 282 ; cease to be an Estate 
of Parliament, 152 ; refuse to take 
the oath to William III., 506 

Clericis Laicos, 129 

Clerkenwell gaol, Fenian attempt 
to blow up, 886 

Cleveland, Duke of, 808 



Clifford, Lord, 474 

Clinton, General, 665, 668, 669, 
670 

Clive, Lord, 602 ; and the conquest 
of India, 606 , 615, 620, 624, 629- 
635 : administration of, 657 ; 
attack on, in Parliament, 675 

Clontarf, battle of, 89 

Closure, Parliamentary, introduc- 
tion of, 921 

Cloth of Gold, Field of, 265 

Coal strike, 1912, the, 962 

Coalfields, development of, 700, 801 

Coalition against Napoleon, (i. ) 725, 

("•) 733. 768 
Coalition Ministry, the . (George 

III.), 685-686 
Coalition Ministry, Lord Aber- 
deen's, 831, 857 
Cobden, Richard, 875 
Cobham, Lord, execution of, 193 
Coenwulf, King of Mercia, 15 
Coercion Bills, Ireland, 832, 834, 

835.913 
Coinage, debasement of, 295, 543 
Colbert, French statesman, 537 
Colborne, Sir John, Governor of 

Canada, 837 
Colchester, siege of, 442 
Coleman, Father, implicated in 

Oates' plot, 480 
Colenso, battle of, 935 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 810 
Colet, John, Dean of St. Paul's, 270 
Colley, Sir George, defeated at 

Laing's Nek and Majuba, 912 
Collieries Bill, the, 824 
Collingwood, Lord, 746 
Collins, William, 703 
Colonies, development of, under 

Victoria, 835 
Colonisation, beginnings and 

growth of, 531, 612-636, 799 
Colt Brigg, Canter of, 599 
Columbus, Christopher, 253 
Combination Laws, 802 ; repeal of, 

806 
Comes, 41, 59 
Commendation, 60 
Commerce, 46, 47, in, 118, 140- 
141 ; between England and 
France, 155 ; growth of, 166, 
220-221; under Henry VII., 
252; under the Tudors, 372 ; in 
seventeenth century, 535 ; Scot- 
tish impetus of the Union to, 
559; under George II., 586- 
588 ; expansion of, during the 
eighteenth century, 695 ; depres- 
sion of, after the Napoleonic 
wars, 778 
Committees of the Articles, aboli- 
tion of, 516 
Commons, House of, growth of 
power, 118, 165 ; and Henry IV., 
190-191, 219; authority of the, 
232 ; power over finance, 364 ; 
conflicts with the House of Lords, 
927, 952, 953, 954 
Commonwealth, the, 445 ; war with 
Holland, 451 ; foreign policy of, 
460 
Commune Concilium, 59 
Commutation, 82, 173, 174 
Compton, Bishop of London, 495, 
498 



INDEX 

Comyn, John, claimant to Scottish 

throne, 133, 137, 
Confirmatio Cartarum, 131, 135, 

136, 139 
Conflans, Admiral, 625 
Congi d'ilire, 282 
Congregation, Lords of the, 319 
Congress, American, 660, 661, 663 ; 

rejects British overtures, 667 
Conservatives, the, 813, 814 
Consols created by Pelham, 609-610 
Consort, the Prince, 878 
Conspiracy Law, the, 898, 901 
Conspiracy to Murder Bill, Palmer- 

ston's, 873 
Constantine, King of Scots, 23 
Constantius Chlorus, 4 
Constitution, development of the, 

232 
Constitutional crisis, the, 955, 958 
Continental system, Napoleon's, 

749 
" Convention of London, ' the 

(1884), 912, 931 
Convention of Westminster, 616 
Convention, the Scottish, 557 
Convention Parliament, the, (1) 

467 (2) 502 
Convention Parliament, Scottish, 

5 r 4 

Convict settlements in Australia, 839 

Convocation. See Church, and 
Clergy 

Cook, Captain, voyages of, 722 

Coote, Sir Eyre, defeats the French 
at Wandewash, 634; routs Haidar 
Ali, 679 

Cope, Sir John, defeat of, at Preston- 
pans, 600 

Copenhagen, battle of, 735 ; bom- 
bardment of, 752 

Corn Law, the, 779, 784, 805 ; 
repeal of the, 814, 823 

Cornishmen, rising of, under Henry 
VII. , 246 

Coroners, 94 

Corporation Act, the, 470 ; aboli- 
tion of, 788 

Corporations, 214 

Corruption, Parliamentary, by 
Walpole, 584 

Corsica offered to Britain, 650 

Corunna, battle of, 755 

Cornwallis, Admiral, 746 

Cornwallis, Lord, his operations in 
America, 668, 670, 671 ; Gover- 
nor-General of India, 719 ; Lord- 
Lieutenant of Ireland, 740, 741, 
746 ; returns to India as Gover- 
nor-General, 765 

Cottars, 65, 695 ; extinction of, 
696, 803 

Cotton famine, the, 882 

Cotton industry , introduction of ,375 

Cotton-mule, invention of, by 
Samuel Crompton, 698 

Council, the Great, 58, 59 

Council of Executors nominated 
by Henry VI 1 1., 297 

Council of Executors favour re- 
formed doctrines, 299 

Council of Twelve, 164 

Courts of Law, 86 

Coutances, Walter of, Justiciar, 93 

Covenant, National League and, 
420 



969 



Covenant, Solemn League and, 
431, 434, 438; publicly burnt, 
470 

Covenanters withdraw from Eng- 
land, 438 ; routed at Rullion 
Green , 486 ; routed at Drumclog, 
487 ; persecution of, 488, 559 

Cowper- Temple Clause, the, 898 

Crafts, growth of, 141 ; progress 
of, 219 

Cranborne, Lord. See Salisbury, 
Marquis of 

Cranmer, Archbishop, 291 ; and 
the divorce of Katharine of Ara- 
gon, 279-281, 303, 309; martyr- 
dom of, 311-312 

Crecy, battle of, 157 

Crefeld, battle of, 623 

Crepy, Peace of, 295 

Cressingham, Hugh, 134 

Crete, autonomy of, 940 

Cr^vant, battle of, 199 ; the Scots 
at, 223 

Crewe, Chief Justice, 399 

Crimean War, the, 859-862 

Crimes Act, Ireland, 922, 924 

Crimes, punishment of, under the 
early English, 43-44 

Criminal Code revised by Peel, 784 

Criminal Law Amendment Act, 
898, 901 

Cromer, Lord, Agent and Consul- 
General in Egypt, 916 

Crompton, Samuel, inventor of the 
cotton-mule, 698 

Cromwell, Oliver, 429; raises his 
" Ironsides," 431 ; at Marston 
Moor, 432 ; and the New Model, 
435 ; victory at Preston, 442 ; 
succeeds Fairfax, 448 ; victory 
at Dunbar, 449 ; victory at Wor- 
cester, 449; character of, 450; 
becomes Lcrd Protector, 455 ; 
policy of, 456 ; declines title of 
king, 459 ; war with Spain, 460; 
alliance with France, 461 ; death 
of, 462 

Cromwell, Richard, Protector, 463 

Cromwell, Thomas, 278, 279; ap- 
pointed Vicar-General, 283; fall 
and execution of, 288 

Cronje, General, surrender of, at 
Paardeberg, 937 

Cropredy Bridge, battle of, 433 

Crown, powers of the, 219 ; and 
people, conflict of, 383 ; and 
Parliament, 581 

Crusades, the, 69, 86 

Culloden, battle of, 600 

Cumberland, 114 

Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of, 
popular detestation of, 781 ; be- 
comes King of Hanover, 815 

Cumberland, William, Duke of, de- 
feated at Fontenoy, 596 ; defeats 
Young Pretender at Culloden, 
600 ; signs Convention of Kloster 
Seven, 621 

Curia Regis, 74, 86 

Currency, lack of, in early England, 
46 ; growth of, 74, in 

Curzon, Lord, Viceroy of India, 

956 
Customs duties, 120 
Customs, " Great and Ancient," 

139, 167, 169 



97© 

DACOITS, suppression of, in India, 

798 
Dalhousie, Lord, Governor-General 

of India, 850-851, 864 
Dalrymple, Sir Hew, 754, 755 
Dalrymple, Sir John, Master of 

Stair, 517 
Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of, 
minister of Charles II., 478 ; im- 
peachment and imprisonment of, 
481 ; release of, 490 ; 498, 503, 
508, 522 
Danegeld, 64, 66, 74 
Danelagh, the, 19 
Danes, descent of the, 15^16 ; 
defeat of, at Aclea, 17; conquer 
Northumbria, 18 ; invade Wessex, 
18 ; defeat Saxons at Basing, 18 ; 
defeated at Ethandune, 19 ; seize 
Exeter, 19 ; invasions of, 27 ; 
general massacre of, on St. Brice's 
Day, 27; attack on Ireland, 89 
Danton, 716, 725 
Darien Scheme, the, 539 
Darnley, Henry Lord, marries 
Mary Queen of Scots, 322 ; murder 
of, 323 
Darwin, Charles, 888 
David, King of Scotland, 75, 76 
David I. , King of Scotland, 75, 76, 

78, 79, 114 
David II., King of Scotland, 150; 
sent to France, 152 ; defeated by 
English and taken prisoner, 158 ; 
released, 159 ; captive in England, 
185 ; death of, 186 
David ap Griffith captures Hawar- 

den, 124, 125 
David, John, explorer, 335 
Death Duties, creation of, 927 
Death penalty almost abolished by 

William I. , 56 
De Bohun, Henry, 144 
Deccan, the, 764 
Declaration of Independence, 

American, the, 663 
Declaration of Right, the, 503 
Declaration of Rights, American, 

660 
Declaratory Act, 648 
Declaratory Act (Ireland), 689 ; 

repeal of, 694 
Defoe, Daniel, 555, 704 
De Grasse, Admiral, co-operates 
with George Washington, 671 ; 
defeated by Rodney in the West 
Indies, 672-673 
De Grey, John, 96 
Deira, kingdom of, 11 
De Lacey, Hugh, justiciar of 

Ireland, 91 
Delhi sacked by Nadir Shab, 675 ; 
868 ; Sindhia's and Holkar's 
attack on, 764 ; siege of, 869 ; 
capital of India, 962 
Demesne, the, 46 

Democratic movement, the, 777, 946 
Denmark, Canning's coercion of, 

752, 880 
Deorham, battle of, 10, 11 
Derby, Lord, Prime Minister, 829, 
830, 873 ; third administration 
of, 884-886 ; resignation of, 903 
Derby, Lord, Colonial Secretary, 

918. See also Stanley, Lord 
D'Erlon. See Drouet 



INDEX 

Dermot, King of Leinster, 90 
Derry, siege of, 511 
Desmond's rebellion, 338 
Despenser, Hugh, favourite of 

Edward II., 148 
D'Estaing, French Admiral, 668 
Dettingen, battle of, 594 
Devon Commission, the, 833-834 
Devonshire, Duke of, Prime Minis- 
ter, 618 
Devonshire, Duke of, 930 ; resigna- 
tion of, 951 
Devonshire, Earl of, 498 
De Wet, General Christian, 937-938 
Dialogue on the Exchequer, Fitz- 

Neal's, 55 
Diamond Hill, battle of, 937 
Dickens, Charles, 856 
Dilke, Sir Charles, 911 
Dinapur, the mutiny at, 870 
Dingan, King of the Zulus, 843 
Diplomacy, international, rise of, 

243. 244 

Directory, the French, 725 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 822, 826 ; 

Chancellor of the Exchequer, 

829 ; novels of, 856 ; leader of 

the Commons, 873-874, 884, 894 ; 

Prime Minister, 901 ; foreign 

policy of, 901-904 ; death of, 914 

" Divine right of kings," the, 383- 

384 
Dogger Bank, battle of the, 671 ; 

incident of the, 958 
Domesday Book, 64-66 
Donalbane, King of Scotland, 70 
Donald, Lord of the Isles, claims 
Earldom of Ross and is defeated 
at Harlaw, 223 
Dongola, occupation of, 940 
Donne, John, 544 
" Dooms," or Laws, 42, 43 
Dorchester, Lord. See Carleton 
Dost Mohammed, ruler of Kabul, 

845, 846; restored, 846, 863 
Douglas, Bishop Gavin, poet, 378 
Douglas, Catherine " Barlass," 224 
Douglas, Lord James, "the Black," 

142, 224 
Douglas, Lord William, 224 
Dover, riot at, 32; loyalty of, to 

John, 100; treaty of, 476, 488 
Drake, Sir Francis, harries the 
Spaniards, 334-335; Darien ex- 
pedition, 335 ; expedition to the 
West Indies, 342 ; expedition 
to Cadiz, 347, 349 ; Lisbon ex- 
pedition, 351 ; expedition to the 
West Indies, 352 
Dresden, battle of, 762 
Drogheda stormed by Cromwell, 446 
Drouet D'Erlon, Marshal, 770, 773 
Drumclog, rout of Covenanters at, 

487 
Dryden, John, 546 
Dudley, Lord Guildford, marriage 
to Lady Jane Grey, 306 ; execu- 
tion of, 310 
Dunbar, battle of, 449 
Dunbar, William, poet, 378 
Duncan, Admiral, wins battle of 

Camperdown, 730 
Duncan, King of Scots, 33 
Dundalk, battle of, 145 
Dundee. See Claverhouse 
Dunes, battle of the, 461 



Dunkeld, battle of, 516 

Dunkirk, 461 ; sold to France by 
Charles II. , 471 

Dunning's resolution, 684 

Dunsinane, battle of, 33 

Dunstan, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, 25-26 

Dupleix, 602-608 

Dupplin Moor, battle of, 151 

Durban, Sir Benjamin, Governor 
of Cape Colony, 842 

Durham, Lord, Governor of 
Canada, 837 

Dutch wars with the Common- 
wealth, 451; with Charles II. , 472 

Duties, reduction of, 785, 875, 876 

Dynamite outrages, 918 

Eadred, King of England, sub- 
dues the Danes, 25 
Eadric Streona, 27 
Ealdormen, position and duties of, 

41. 59 
East India Company, the, 374, 472, 

522, 531, 536, 537, 538, 541, 578, 

602, 605-608, 656, 676, 681,686, 

717 ; abolition of, 718, 815, 872 
East India Company, Dutch, 472 
East India Company, the French, 

537 ■ 54 1 ! struggle with British 

East India Company, 597, 602, 

605 
Eastern, or Prussian Company, 374 
Eastern Question, the, 902 
Eastern rising, the, 301 
Ecclesiastical Commission, Court 

of, created by James II. , 495 
Ecclesiastical Regulations, Scottish, 

419 
Ecgbert, King of Wessex, 15-16 
Ecgfrith of Northumbria defeated 

at Nechtansmere, 14 
Economic Reform Bill, Burke's, 684 
Edgar, King of England, reign of, 

25-26, 32 
Edgar, King of Scotland, 70 
Edgar the jEtheling, 29 
Edgar the ^Ethling, 35 
Edgar the ^Etheling, elected king, 

50, 53 
Edgehill, battle of, 429 
Edict of Nantes, the, revoked by 

Louis XIV., 494 
Edinburgh captured by the forces 

of Bruce, 142; 294; sacked by 

Protector Somerset, 299 ; treaty 

of, 319 
Edinburgh Review, The, 811 
Edington, or Ethandune, battle of, 

19 

Edith, wife of Edward the Con- 
fessor, 31 

Edmund "the Deed-doer," King, 

24 
Edmund Ironside, 28 
Edmund, St., 18, 22 
Education, reform of, 270 
Education, 854-855 ; Forster's Act, 

897 ; Act of 1891, 926 
Education Bill, 944, 945 ; defeated 

by the Peers, 952 ; Asquith's, 953 
Edward the Black Prince, 159, 160, 

161, 162, 163, 164 
Edward the Confessor, 31 
Edward the Elder, King of Wessex, 

reign and policy of, 22-33 



i 



Edward the Martyr, 26 

Edward I. defeats de Montfort at 
Evesham, 107 ; reign of, 117-141 ; 
character of, 118 ; policy of, 119 ; 
and the Church, 121 ; conquers 
Wales, 122 ; defeated near Menai 
Strait, 125 ; and the Constitution, 
126; conquest of Scotland, 127- 
128; policy of, 128; relations 
with Philip IV. of France, 128 ; 
Flemish Expedition, 131 ; con- 
tinental relations, 136 ; policy of, 
I37» 138-141 ; and finance, 139- 
140 ; commercial developments 
under, 141 

Edward II. invades Scotland, 142; 
follies of, 145-148 ; forced to ab- 
dicate, and murdered, 149-150 

Edward III. proclaimed and 
crowned, 149 ; overthrows Morti- 
mer, 150 ; defeats Scots at Hali- 
don Hill, 152; war with France, 
154; his claims to the French 
thrbne, 154-155 ; invades Nor- 
mandy, 157 ; military prowess of, 
160; renews his war with France, 
162; disasters of his later years, 
163; policy of, 166; strains 
royal prerogative, 167 ; and the 
baronage, 172 

Edward IV. proclaimed king, 209 ; 
marriage of, 211 ; captured by 
Warwick and released, 212 ; flees 
to Burgundy, 212 ; regains the 
throne, 212-213 I character and 
policy of, 213-215 ; proposed 
war upon France, 215 ; death of, 

215 

Edward V. accession of, 215 ; 

murder of, 216 
Edward VI., death of, 306 
Edward VII., reign of, 949 ; death 

of, 955 
Edwardes, Herbert, 850, 851 
Edwin, Earl of Mercia, 34; de- 
feated at York, 37 ; 51 
Edwin, King of Northumbria, 12 
Edwy appointed king, 24 ; divi- 
sion of his kingdom, 25 
Edwy, son of ^Ethelred, 29 
Egypt, Napoleon's expedition to, 
731-734 ; British relations with, 
915 ; Britain takes control of, 
916 ; Salisbury's policy in, 928- 
929, 940 
Elections, borough and shire, under 

Edward IV. , 214 
Elgin, Lord, 878 ; Governor- 
General of India, 887 
Eliot, George, 888 
Eliot, Sir John, 399, 400, 410 ' 
Elizabeth, Queen, accession of, 
314 ; policy of, 315 ; and the 
Church, 316 ; and the national 
finances, 317 ; supports Lords of 
the Congregation, 319; plots to 
murder, 324 ; prosperous rule of, 
325 ; diplomatic relations with 
Spain, 329; administration of 
Ireland under, 330-332 ; alliance 
with the Dutch, 342 ; helps Henry 
of Navarre, 352 ; relations with 
Scotland, 356; death of, 361; 
. character of, 361 
Elizabeth, Poor Law of, 695 
Elizabeth, Tsarina, 613, 614, 616 



INDEX 

Elizabethan Age, the, 543 

Ellandune, battle of, 15 

Ellenborough, Lord, Governor- 
General of India, 846, 848 

Elliott, Sir George, defender of 
Gibraltar, 673 

El-Teb, battle of, 917 

Emancipation of Slaves Act, 838, 
841 

Emmet, Robert, insurrection of, 

745 
Employers' Liability Bill, 927, 

945 

Enclosure of land, 301, 695 

Encumbered Estates Act, the, 835 

Enghien, Due d', murder of, 746 

Engineers, strike of, 1852, 854 

Engineers' Society, the, 890 

English people, traits of the, 117 

Enniskillen, siege of, 510 

Entail, 122 

Entente cordiale, the, 958 

Episcopacy in Scotland, 416; Act 
abolishing, 516 

Episcopate, Scottish, restoration of 
by, James VI. , 356 

Erasmus, 270 

Eric, King of Norway, 115, 132 

Escheat, 63 

Essex, Earl of, captures Cadiz, 
3 2 5> 354 I f all of, 357-359 ; failure 
in Ireland, 360 ; execution of, 
360 

Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of, 
commands the Parliamentary 
forces, 429 ; commits suicide in 
, the Tower, 489 

Etaples, Peace of, 246 

Ethandune, battle of, 19 

Eugene, Prince, commander of the 
Austrian forces, 552 ; joined by 
Marlborough, 553 ; drives the 
French out of Italy, 560 

Euphues, John Lyly's, 379 

Europe, state of, during the Middle 
Ages, 230-232 ; condition of, 
during reign of Elizabeth, 320- 
321, 327 ; settlement of, after 
Waterloo, 775 

European Concert, the, 903 

Eustace, Count, of Boulogne, 32 

Eustace, son of Stephen, tj 

Exchequer, Court of, 74 

Exchequer, "Stop" of the, 477, 

541 
Excise, 540 

Excise Bill, Wal pole's, 587 
Exclusion Bill, the, 481, 482 
Exeter, Danes occupy and retire 

from, 19 
Exeter, Marquis of, executed for 

treason, 287 
Export trade under Edward III., 

169 
Evesham, battle of, 107 
Eylau, battle of, 751 
Eyre, Sir George, Governor of 

Jamaica, 887 

Factories and Workshops Acts, 
1867, 890 ; modification of, 927 

Factory Act, first, the, 815, 816- 
818, 824, 825 ; Fielden's, 827 

Faerie Queen, The, 380 

Fairfax, Lord, holds Hull against 
Royalists, 430, 433 



971 



Fairfax, Sir Thomas, Commander- 
in-Chief of the Parliamentary 
forces, 435, 442, 448 ; joins Monk, 

465 

Palaise, treaty of, 85, 92, 114 

Falkirk, battle of, 127 136, 600 

Falkland, Lucius Carey, Lord, 
469 

Family Compact, the, (i.) 589; (ii.) 
638 

Family Compact, Canadian, 799 

Fashoda incident, the, 941 

Fawkes, Guy, 388 

Federation League, the, 917 

Felonies Act, 305 

Felton, John, assassin of Bucking- 
ham, 404 

Fenianism, 885-886, 896 

Fenwick, Sir John, discloses Jaco- 
bite intrigues, 524 

Ferdinand of Aragon makes alli- 
ance with Henry VII. , 244-245 

Ferdinand of Spain, 596 

Ferrar, Bishop, martyred, 311 

Feudal System, 51, 53, 60 

Fielden's Factory Act, 827 

Fielding, Henry, 705 

Fifth Monarchy Men, the, 457, 
468 

Finance, national, 74, 126, 139; 
Commons assert exclusive right 
over, 191 ; chaos of, during reign 
of Edward VI., 305; in the 
seventeenth century, 540 

Finch, Speaker, 410 

Fire of London, the Great, 472 

Firozpur, 849 

Firozshah, battle of, 849 

Fiscal Policy, the problem of, 950- 

951 
Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 

270; committed to the Tower, 

282 ; executed, 283 
Fitz-Neal, Richard, 55, 109 
Fitz-Osbern, Roger, insurrection of, 

56 
Fitz-Osbern, William, 51 
Fitz-Peter, Geoffrey, justiciar, 93, 

94. 95. 97 

Fitz-William, Lord, Viceroy of Ire- 
land, 739 

Five Articles of Perth, the, 417 

Five Members, impeachment of 
the, 427 

Five Mile Act, the, 470 

Flambard, Ranulf, 68, ji 

Flamsteed, 548 

Flanders, 130, 154 

Fleetwood, General, 463 

Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 558 

Fleury, Cardinal, minister of Louis 
XV. of France, 589 

Flodden, battle of, 263, 264 

Flood, Henry, 693 

Florentines, financial relations with 
Edward I., 140; banishment of, 

147 

Florida, 673 

Fly-shuttle, invention of, by John 

Kay, 697 
Folc-land, 46 
Folc-moot, 54, 55, 60 
Folk-moots, 43 
Fontenoy, battle of, 596 
Forbes, Duncan, 600, 601 
Foreign commerce 221 



972 

Forest Law, 56 

Forfeiture, 63 

Formigny, battle of, 204 

Forster, William Edward, his Edu- 
cation Act, 897 ; Chief Secretary 
for Ireland, 913-914 

Fort Duquesne, capture of, 624 

Fort St. David, 604 

Fort St. George. See Madras 

Fort William. See Calcutta 

Forty Articles, the, 304 

"Forty-shilling freeholders," the, 
789 

"Forward Policy" (India), the, 887 

" Four days battle," the, 472 

Fox, Charles James, 684; coalition 
with North, 685, 707; alliance 
with Pitt, 745 ; death of, 750 

Fox, Henry, 617, 618 

Foxe, John, author of the Book of 
Martyrs, 378 

France, relations and wars with, 
56, 71, 81, 82, 93, 94-96, 97, 98, 
101, 104, 108, 128, 130-131, 
149 ; the Hundred Years' War, 
1^2-163, 167, 181, 192-200, 204 ; 
210, 218, 219, 230-232, 243, 245, 
254, 262, 265, 266-268, 291-295, 
3 I 3» 3 I 9-3 2 i. 3 2 8, 34°-34 2 - 3 86 > 
399. 461-462, 468, 471, 476, 479, 
494-495- 49 8 -S°°. 518-519, 523- 
524, 526-530 ; in Canada, 533 ; 
in India, 537, 541 ; 550-554, 560- 
563, 566-568, 575-577. 5 8 8-59i. 
592-596; in India, 597, 602, 605- 
608, 622-635 '. m Canada, 612- 
613; 614-629, 638-641; supports 
America in her War of Independ- 
ence, 666 ; Pitt's commercial 
treaty with, 709 ; the Revolution, 
714-717, 724 ; the war with the 
Republic, 724 ; under the Re- 
public, 731 ; sends force under 
Hoche to assist Wolfe Tone's 
rebellion, 740 ; Cobden's com- 
mercial treaty with, 875 ; and 
Italian unity, 879 ; war with 
Prussia, 892-893 

Franchise, extension of, in 1832, 
792 

Franchise Bill, the, 918 

Francis I., Emperor of Austria, 
596 

Francis I. of France meets Henry 
VIII. at the Field of the Cloth 
of Gold, 265 ; ally of the Scots, 
292 

Francis, Philip, 676 

Franklin, Benjamin, 659 

Franks, 4 

Fraser, General, expels Holkar from 
Northern India, 765 

Frederick, Elector-Palatine, 385 ; 
marries Elizabeth, daughter of 
James I. , 392 

Frederick the Great of Prussia and 
the Austrian Succession, 593, 594, 
596, 612; his war with Austria, 
613-614, 616-622, 628-638 ; de- 
signs on Poland, 638 

Free Kirk, the, 856 

Free Trade, 568, 784, 813, 821, 825, 
826, 834 ; Gladstone's Budgets, 
874, 875 ; challenged by Joseph 
Chamberlain, 949 

Freemen, the, 48, 65, iio-iii 



INDEX 

French Canadians, the, 836 

French, General, 935 

Frere, Sir Bartle, High Commis- 
sioner for South Africa, 909 

Friars, no 

Friedland, battle of, 751 

"Frith," the, or Saxon-Danish 
treaty, 22 

Frobisher, Martin, Arctic voyages 

of, 335. 349 
Fuentes d'Onoro, battle of, 759 
Fulk, Count of Anjou, 71 
Fyrd, the, 4 8, 55 

Gaekwar, the, 676, 678, 680, 

795 

Gaelic invasion, 1 

Gaels, the, 2, 5 

Gage, General, 660 

Gama, Vasco da, 253 

Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Win- 
chester, 278, 291 ; imprisonment 
of, 299, 303 ; released by Mary, 
309 ; 310 

Garibaldi, 880 

Garrisons, Roman, in Britain, 2 

Gascony, campaign in, 157 

Gatacre, General, 935 

Gaunt, John of. See Lancaster 

Gaveston, Piers, favourite of Ed- 
ward II. , 145 ; death of, 147 

Geddes, Jenny, 419 

General Assembly of the Kirk, 
415 ; defies Charles I. , 420 ; in- 
troduce Presbyterianism, 355, 
5i6 

Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, 75 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 236 

George I., accession of, 571-572; 
alliance with France, 575 

George II., 584; at the battle of 
Dettingen, 594 ; death of, 628 

George III., character of, 636; 
opposition to the Whigs, 641 ; 
madness of, 647, 711, 758 ; 
thwarts Fox's India Bill, 687 ; 
death of, 780 ; his character, 
781 

George III. , 851 

George IV. , accession of, 790 ; treat- 
ment of his wife, Caroline of 
Brunswick, 781 ; death of, 790 ; 
his character, 790 

George V. , reign of, 958 et seq. 

George, David Lloyd, Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, 953-954 ; his 
National Insurance Act, 961 

German Empire, the, 892-894 

German's Town, battle of, 665 

Germany, popular risings in, 827 ; 
recent naval development of, 
958 

Gesiths, 41 

Ghazni, 846 

Ghent, treaty of, 766 

Ghurkas, friendly relations with the, 

765 
Gibbon, Edward, 706 
Gibraltar captured by Sir George 

Rooke 554; besieged by Spain, 

670; siege of, 671, 672; relieved 

by Howe, 673 
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 374 ; 

pioneer of Imperialism, 531 
Gilbert's Act, 803, 818 
Gildas, 6, n 



Gild-merchants, 112 

Gilds, growth of, 141 ; the craft, 
220, 375, 376 

Ginckel, General, Commander in 
Ireland, 512 

Girondins, the, 725 

Gladstone, William Ewart, 822; 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, 857, 
874, 885 ; proposes disestablish- 
ment of Church of Ireland, 886; 
becomes Liberal leader, 894; 
Prime Minister, 905 ; second ad- 
ministration, 911 ; Irish mea- 
sures, 913 ; third administration 
of, 920 ; fourth administration of, 
924; retirement of, 924, 927; 
death of, 947 

Glencoe, massacre of, 517; battle 

of, 935 
Glendower, Owen, leads Welsh 

rising against Henry IV., 189, 

190, 191 
Gloucester, Earl of, 138 
Gloucester, Gilbert, Earl of, chosen 

elector , 106 
Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke ot, 

Regent of England, 198, 203, 204 
Gloucester invested by Charles I., 

43° 
Gloucester, Richard, Duke of, 215. 

See Richard III. 
Gloucester, Robert, Earl of, 75, 76, 

17 
Gloucester, Statute of, 120 
Gloucester, Thomas Duke of, op- 
poses Richard II., 180; arrest 

and death of, 181 
Goddard, Captain, 678 
Goderick, Frederick Robinson, 

Lord, Prime Minister, 787 
Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry, murder 

of, 481 
Godiva, Lady, 34 
Godolphin, Lord, 492, 502, 522; 

retirement of, 524 ; returns to the 

ministry, 528, 563, 564 
Godoy, Don Manuel de, minister of 

Charles IV. of Spain, 753 
Godwin, Earl, 30, 31, 32 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 697, 704 
Gorbodnc, by Nicholas Udall, 380 
Gordon, General, sent to the Sudan, 

916 ; death of, at Khartum, 

917 
Gordon, Lord George, leader of 

the " No-Popery " riots, 684 
Gordon, George William, inciter of 

Jamaican insurrection, 887 
Goschen, G. J., Chancellor of the 

Exchequer, 921 
Gough, Lord, 849, 851 
Government, continuity of, after the 

Norman Conquest, 54, 59 ; evolu- 
tion of, 118 
Gower, John, author, 239 
Grace, Act of, 508 
Grafton, Augustus Fitzroy, Duke of, 

colleague of William Pitt, 649 ; 

his administration, 650-654 
Graham, General, defeats the 

Mahdi at El-Teb, 917 
Graham, Sir James, 822 
Granby, Marquis of, 625 
Grand Alliance, the, 524-530, 561 
Grand Remonstrance, the, 426 
Granville, Lord, 895, 911 



Grattan, Henry, 693, 694 ; leader 

of the Irish Parliament, 738, 

740 
Gravelines, defeat of the Spanish 

Armada off, 349 
Gray, Thomas, 704 
Great Contract, the, 391 
Great Council, the, 94, 104, 106 
Great Trek, the, 842-843 
Greece, War of Independence, 787 ; 

war with Turkey, 940 
Greene, Robert, 580 
Gregory VII., Pope, conflict with 

William I., 57 
Grenville, George, Prime Minister, 

641 ; his colonial policy, 643-647 ; 

743. 745 

Grenville, Lord, ministry of, 750 

Grenville, Sir Richard, engages 
Spanish fleet off the Azores, 352 

Gretna Green, 611 

Grey, Charles, Lord, Prime Minis- 
ter, 791, 814, 815, 829 

Grey, George, 841 

Grey, Lady Jane, 306 ; execution of, 
310 

Grey, Lord Leonard, Deputy-Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, 291 

Griffith, King of North Wales, 34 

Grossetete, Bishop of Lincoln, 
no 

Grouchy, Marshal, 771 

Guadeloupe, capture of, 625 

Gualo, Papal legate, 101 

Guesclin, Bertrand du, 161 

Guienne, loss of, 207 

Gujerat, battle of, 851 

Gunpowder, adoption of, in war, 
234-235 

Gunpowder Plot, 388 

Guthenberg, John, inventor of the 
printing-press, 240 

Guthrum, defeat of, by, and treaty 
with, Alfred, 19-20 

Gwalior, capture of, 679 ; campaign 
against, 847 

Haakon, King of Norway, in- 
vades Scotland, 115 

Habeas Corpus, writ of, refused 
by Charles I., 400 

Habeas Corpus Act, 482 ; Irish 
demand for, 690 ; suspension of, 
779, 884, 885 

Hadrian's Wall, 2 

Haidar Ali, 656 ; Hastings's war 
with, 678 

Hal, Prince, 189 ; and Judge Gas- 
coigne, 191 

Haldane, Lord, Army reforms of, 

952 
Hales, Colonel, 495 
Hales, Treasurer, murder of, 177 
Halfdan attacks Wessex, 18 
Halidcn Hiil, battle of, 152 
Halifax, 502, 508 
Halifax, George Savile, Earl of, 

483 
Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 

562 
Hamilton, William, Duke of, 558 
Hampden, John, 427, 430 
Hampton Court Conference, the, 

387. 405 
Hanover, severance of, from 
Britain, 814 



INDEX 

Hanoverian Succession, the, 557, 
558, 568-571 

Hanseatic League, 254 

Hapsburgs, the, ^j 

Harald Hardraada, 36, 37 

Harcourt, Lord, Viceroy of Ireland, 
691 

Harcourt, Sir William, creates 
Death Duties, 927 

Hardinge, Henry, Lord, Governor- 
General of India, 848, 850 

Harfleur, siege of, 195 

Hargreave, Robert, inventor of the 
spinning-jenny, 697 

Harlaw, battle of, 222 

Harley. See Oxford, Earl of 

Harold Godwinson, chief minister, 
32-33 ; his promise to William 
the Conqueror, 34 ; elected king, 
35 ; difficulties of, 36 ; defeat 
and death of, 38, 50 

Harold " Harefoot," 31 

Harthacnut, King of England, 

3 1 

Hartington, Lord, 911, 921. See 
also Devonshire, Duke of 

Harvey, William, discoverer of the 
circulation of the blood, 547 

Hasting the Viking, 20 

Hastings, John, claimant to Scot- 
tish throne, 133 

Hastings, Lord, execution of, by 
Richard III., 216 

Hastings, Marquess of, Governor- 
General of India, 765, 794-796, 
864 

Hastings, Warren, Governor of 
Bengal, 674 ; made Governor- 
General of India, 674 ; impeach- 
ment of, 718-719 

Havelock, Sir Henry, 869, 870 

Havre bombarded by Rodney, 
625 

Hawarden captured by David ap 
Griffith, 124 

Hawke, Admiral Lord, 596, 621 ; 
defeats French fleet at Quiberon 
Bay, 626 

Hawkins, Sir John, 333, 349 ; har- 
ries Spanish shipping, 351 ; ex- 
pedition with Drake to the West 
Indies, 352 

Hawley, General, defeat of, at Fal- 
kirk, 600 

Heathfield, battle of, 12 

Heavy Brigade, charge of, at Bala- 
clava, 861 

Hedgely Moor, battle of, 2-10 

Helvetian Republic, the (Switzer- 
land), 731 

Hengist, Jutish chief, 6, 8 

Hengston Down, battle of, 17 

Henry I., character of, 70 ; marries 
Edith, 71 ; wars with Normandy, 
71, 72; and the Church, 72; 
policy of, 73-75, 109 

Henry II., accession of, 81 ; conti- 
nental possessions of, 81 ; charac- 
ter and policy of, 82-83 > quarrel 
with Becket, 83, 84 ; insurrec- 
tions against, 85, 87 ; invasion of 
Ireland, 90, 109 

Henry III. , accession of, 101 ; as- 
sumes the Government, 102 ; char- 
acter of, 103 ; and the Papacy, 
103-104; expeditions in France, 



973 

104; war with Wales, 104; con- 
firmations of the Charter, 105, 
117 ; struggle with de Montfort, 
105 ; death of, 107 

Henry IV., accession of, 188; re- 
bellions against, 188-190 ; death 
of, 190 

Henry V., character of, 192; per- 
secutes the Lollards, 192 ; his war 
with France, 192-198 ; conquest 
of Normandy, 197 ; death of, 198 

Henry VI. , marriage of, 204 ; cap- 
tured by the Yorkists, 207, 208 ; 
imbecility of, 207 ; restored to 
the throne by Warwick, 212 ; 
death of, 213 

Henry VII., crowned on Bosworth 
field, 218 ; accession of, 241 ; in- 
surrections against, 243 ; alliance 
with Spain, 244-245 ; occupation 
of Brittany, 245 ; character of, 
248 ; domestic policy of, 249 ; 
foreign policy of, 249 ; methods 
of filling his treasury, 250-251 ; 
policy of, 252 

Henry VIII. , marries Katharine of 
Aragon, 262; attacks Guienne, 
262 ; relations with James IV. 
of Scotland, 263 ; alliance with 
France, 265 ; wars with France, 
266 ; obtains title of Defender of 
the Faith, 269 ; divorce of Katha- 
rine of Aragon, 275 ; conflict with 
the Papacy, 278-281 ; despoils 
the monasteries , 283-284 ; marries 
Jane Seymour, 286; marries Anne 
of Cleves, 286; suppresses the 
monasteries, 287; his designs on 
Scotland, 289 ; continental and 
Scottish relations, 291; marries 
Catherine Howard, 291; marries 
Catherine Parr, 291 ; alliance with 
Emperor Charles, 294 ; wars with 
Scotland and France, 294-295 ; 
and finance, 295 ; fixes the suc- 
cession, 296; death of, 297 

Henryson, Robert, Scottish poet, 

239 

Heptarchy, the, 9-10 

Herat, siege of, 846 ; captured by 
the Persians, 863 

Herbert, George, 545 

Hereditary succession, 119 

Hereford, Duke of, banished by 
Richard II., 183; claims the 
crown, 184 

Hereford, Earl of, conspiracy 
against William I., 54 

Hereford, Humphrey de Bohun, 
Earl of, 128, 130, 138 

Heretico Comburendo, Statute de, 
190 

Hereward the Wake, 53, 54 

Herzegovina, revolt of, 903 

Hicks Pasha, annihilation of his 
expedition against the Mahdi, 916 

High Commission, Court of, 316, 
371 ; abolished, 425 

Hildebrand. See Gregory VII. 

Hill, General, 761 

Hindus, the, and the Mutiny, 867, 
868 

Hobbes, Thomas, 547 

Hoche, General Lazare, 727; com- 
mands French expedition to Ire- 
land, 741 



974 

Hohenlinden, battle of, 735 

Holkar, 676, 764, 795 

Holland, war with the Common- 
wealth, 451 ; war with, under 
George III., 671 ; joi.is coalition 
against Napoleon, 726 ; invaded 
by the French, 727 ; Batavian 
Republic, 728 ; defeat in the 
Texel, 734 

Holies, Denzil, 410 

Holy Alliance, the, 776, 777 

Holy Roman Empire, the, 230 ; 
dissolved by Napoleon, 750 ; 892 

Home, John, 705 

Home Rule, 896-897, 904, 920, 923, 
924,949,951,960 

Homildon Hill, battle of, 189 

Hone, William, prosecution of, 

779 
Hong-Kong ceded to Britain, 863 
Honorius III., Pope, 101 
Hood, Admiral, 726 
Hooker, Richard, Ecclesiastical 

Polity of, 372 
Hooper, John , Bishop of Gloucester, 

martyred, 311 
Hopton.Sir Ralph, Royalist General, 

430 
Horsa, Jutish chief, 6, 8 
Hotham, Admiral, 728 
Hotspur, Harry. See Percy 
Hougoumont, Chateau of, 772 
Howard of Effingham, Lord, de- 
feats the Armada, 349 
Howe, Admiral, Lord, 668 ; relieves 
Gibraltar, 673 ; defeats French 
fleet off Ushant, 727 
Howe, General, 662, 663, 668 
Hubert de Burgh. See Burgh 
Hubert, Walter, death of, 96 
Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 93 
Hughes, Admiral, 679 
Huguenots, the, 320, 385, 386 ; in- 
troduction of new industries by, 

69S. 6 97 
Hull besieged by the Royalists, 

432 
Humbert, General, 741 
Humble Petition and Advice, the, 

458,459 

Hume, David, 705 

" Hundred Days," the, 768-774 

Hundred Years' War, the, 153, 
207 

Hundred-reeve, 43 

Hundreds, 42 

Huskisson, William, President of 
the Board of Trade, 784 ; com- 
mercial policy of, 785; resigns, 
788 ; death of, 792 

Huss, John, 269 

Hutchinson, Governor, 659 

Huxley, Professor, 889 

Hyde, Edward. See Clarendon 

Hyde, Laurence. See Rochester 

Hyde Park, demonstration of Re- 
formers at, 884 

Iberians, the, 1 

Ibrahim Pasha, defeat of, at Nava- 

rino, 788 
Iconoclasm, Puritan, 429 
Imperialism, 946 
Impey, Sir Elijah, 676, 681-68 
Impositions, the, 390 
Income tax, 779, 823, 875, 952 



INDEX 

Indemnity, Acts of, 507 

Independence, American Declara- 
tion of, the, 663 

Independents, 371 

India, 591 ; the struggle for, 602, 
640; consolidation of British 
power, 655-657 ; under Warren 
Hastings, 674-682 ; Fox's Bill, 
686 ; Pitt's Bill, 717 ; Napoleon's 
designs on, 734, 736; under Wel- 
lesley, 736; under Lord Hastings, 
794-796 ; under Amherst, 796- 
797 ; under Lord William Ben- 
tinck, 797, 844, 887; the Mutiny, 
864 ; Queen Victoria proclaimed 
Empress of, 905 ; reforms of 
Lord Ripon, 917; famines of 
1897 and 1900, 943 ; the King's 
visit to, 962; Delhi restored to 
its ancient position as capital, 
962 ; under Curzon, 956 

India Act, 1858, 872 

Indian National Congress, the, 
928 

Indulgence, Declaration of, 477; 
(James II.), 496 

Industrial revolution, the, 852 ; un- 
rest, 963-964 

Industry, development of, under 
theTudors, 372, 375 ; in the seven- 
teenth century, 535 ; eighteenth 
century, 695, 801 ; depression of, 
after the Napoleonic wars, 778- 
780 ; revival of, 801 

Ine, King of Wessex, Dooms or 
Laws of, 14 

Infanticide, suppression of, in 
India, 798 

Inkerman, battle of, 861 

Innocent III., Pope, quarrel with 
John, 96 

Innocent IV., Pope, obtains funds 
from Henry III., 104 

Inquisition, the Spanish, 327 

Instrument of Government, the, 

454 
Insurance Act, National, the, 961 
Intercursus Magnus, treaty of, 254 
Interim of Augsburg, 300 
Invention, the era of, 801 
Inverlochy, battle of, 436 
Ionian Isles ceded to Britain, 775 
Ireland, annexation of, 88-91 ; 
Danish attacks on, 89, 144-145 ; 
government of, 257-259; Irish 
Parliament, restricted powers of, 
259, 290-291; disturbances in, 
302, 425; under James I., 389; 
Cromwell's campaign in, 446 ; 
under William III., 509-513; 
Lands Bill, the, 525 ; commerce 
and industry of, in the seven- 
teenth century, 539 ; during the 
eighteenth century, 688-695 ; 
trade of, 693; IrLh Mutiny Bill, 
694 ; restrictions on trade of, 710 ; 
Revolution to the Union, 738 ; 
the Union with, 741 ; Robert 
Emmet's insurrection, 745 ; dis- 
order in, 813; discontent in, 823, 
824; the potato famine in, 825, 
826, 834 ; Peel's Coercion Bill for, 
826; insurrection in, 827; after 
the Reform Bill, 831 ; agrarian 
strife in, 832 ; emigration move- 
ment, 835 ; Fenianism, 883-884 ; 



disestablishment of Church of 3 
886, 894; troubles in, 895; Glad- 
stone's Land Act, 896 ; Universi- 
ties Bill, 900; Gladstone's Bills 
for relief of distress and compen- 
sation for evictions, 913 ; disturb- 
ances and violence in, 915 ; arrest 
of agitators, 922-923; Irish Party, 
924, 927 ; Land Bills, 926 ; Land 
Act of 1896, 944 ; Local Govern- 
ment Act of 1898, 944 
Iron industry, development of, 700 
Ironfields, development of the, 801 
Isabella, Queen of Edward II. , 144, 

146, 149 
Isabella of Spain, 358 
Isandlwana, battle of, 910 
Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 915 
Italy, Napoleon 's conquests in, 728 ; 
campaigns of Napoleon, 735; 
War of Unity, 878 ; completion 
of Unity of, 892 

Jacobinism, 725, 802 

Jacobite intrigues, 518, 522 ; re- 
bellion of 1715, 573-575 I of I 745. 
596, 597-601, 608 

Jacobitism, prevalence of, in the 
Highlands, 559 

Jamaica, colonisation of, 460 ; 
troubles in, 837 ; insurrection in, 
887 

James I., King of Scotland, 222, 
223 ; assassination of, 224 ; poetry 
of, 239 

James II., King of Scotland, 222, 
224 

James III., King of Scotland, 222, 
225 ; defeat and murder of, 259 

James IV. of Scotland marries 
Margaret, daughter of Henry 
VII., 248; reign of, 259-261; 
defeated and slain at Flodden, 
264 

James V. of Scotland, 289 

James VI. of Scotland, minority 
of, 329, 354 ; and the Church, 
356 ; accession to the throne of 
England, 383. See also James I. 

James I., accession of, 383; his 
policy in religious affairs, 386 ; 
Roman Catholic plots against, 
387; character of , 388-389 ; policy 
of, 389 ; foreign policy of, 391- 
397 ; death of, 397 

James II. , accession of, 490 ; char- 
acter and policy of, 491-498 ; 
flight of, 502 ; campaign in Ire- 
land, 509 ; death of, 529 

James, Duke of York, gains naval 
victory over Dutch off Lowestoft, 
472 

James, the Old Pretender, 529 

Jameson Raid, the, 930 

Japan , 878 ; war with China, 940 ; 
war with Russia, 958 

Jassy, peace of, 713 

Java wrested from the Dutch, 
765 

Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, 
raises siege of Orleans, 199 ; de- 
feats the English at Pataye, 200 ; 
crowns Charles VII., 200; mili- 
tary success of, 200 ; capture and 
death of, 200 ; loyalty of the 
Scots to, 223 



Jeffreys, Judge, conducts the Bloody 
Assize, 493 ; imprisoned, 502 

Jellalabad, 846 

Jena, battle of, 750 

Jenkins's ear, 592 

Jerusalem, 86 

Jervis, Admiral, 728 ; defeats 
Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vin- 
cent, 729 

Jesuits, the, 320; and Elizabeth, 
338-339 ; mission of, to England, 
371 ; influence of, in France, 476 

Jews, expulsion of, by Edward I., 
140; readmitted by the Common- 
wealth, 456 

Jhansi, 866; capture of, 871 

Jingoism, 903 

Joan of Arc. See Jeanne d' Arc 

John, accession of, 94; war with 
Philip of France, 95 ; conflict 
with the Papacy, 96-97 ; alliance 
with Emperor Otto, 98 ; char- 
acter and death of, 100-101, 117 

John of Gaunt. See Lancaster 

John, Kingof France, taken prisoner 
at Poictiers, 159 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 702, 809 

Jourdan, Marshal, 727, 728; de- 
feated at Talavera, 757, 762 

" July Revolution," the, 791 

Jumieges, Robert of, Archbishop 
of Canterbury, 32 

Junot, General, 752, 753, 754 

Juntas, the Spanish, 753 

Junto, the, 562, 564 

Jury, trial by, 43 ; selection and 
functions of the, 94 

Justice, administration of, 44 

Jutes settle in Britain, 6-8 

Kabul, 846 ; British mission to, 
906, 907 

Kaffirs, the, 841, 842 

Kandahar, capture of, 846 ; relief 
of, by Roberts, 907 

Katharine of Aragon married to 
Arthur, Prince of Wales, 248 

Kaunitz, Prince, of Austria, 614, 
619 

Kaveripak, battle of, 607 

Kay, John, inventor of the fly- 
shuttle, 697 

Keats, John, 811 

Ken, Bishop, 497 

Kennedy, Bishop, governs Scot- 
land, 225 

Kent, Edward, Duke of, 781 

Ket, Robert, rebellion of, 301 

Khalifa, operations against the, 940 

Khalsa, the, 848, 850, 851 

Khartum, fall of, 917 

Kildare, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of, 
Deputy-Lieutenant of Ireland, 

=57 
Kildare, Earl of, 290 
Kildare, Earl of, " silken Thomas," 

insurrection of, 291 
Killiecrankie, battle of, 516 
" Killing Time," the, 492, 513 
" Kilmainham Treaty," the, 915 
Kilsythe, battle of, 436 
Kimberley, siege of, 935 
Kinship, system of, 43, 44 
Kirk Sessions, Scottish, 516 
Kirke, Colonel, 511 
Kirke's Lambs, 493 



INDEX 

Kitchener, Lord, in South Africa, 
936, 938 ; in India, 956 

Kloster Seven, Convention of, 621 

Knighthood, 139 

Knights of the Shire, 94, 152, 174 

Knox, John, 304, 309, 321 ; death 
°f 1 355 i his History of the Refor- 
mation in Scotland, 378 

Knut (Canute) conquers England, 
30 ; reign of, 31 

Knut, King of Denmark, threatens 
invasion of England, 54 

Koniggratz, battle of, 893 

Kruger, Paul, President of the 
Transvaal, 931 ; flight of, 938 

Kunersdorf, battle of, 625 

Labour and wages, 219; beginning 
of conflict with capitalism, 221 ; 
struggles with capital. 802, 853- 

854. 948 
Labour Party, the, 951 
Labourers, the, 45, 46 
Labourers' Dwellings Act, the, 901 
Labourers, Statute of, 174, 205 
Ladysmith, siege of, 935 
Laets, 45 

Lafayette, General, 670 
La Haye Sainte, 772, 773 
Laing's Nek, battle of (1880), 

912 
Laissez-faire, economic doctrine, 

702, 813, 817, 834, 853, 890 
Lake, Bishop, 497 
Lake, General Lord, defeats Mar- 

athas, 764 
Lake School, the, 810 
Lally, General, besieges Madras, 

634 ; defeated at Wandewash, 

634 
Lambert resuscitates the Rump, 

463, 4 6 4 
Lancaster, John of Gaunt, Duke of, 
heads the anti-clerical faction, 
163 ; commands forces in France, 
163 ; proposal as to the succes- 
sion, 164 ; maladministration of, 
179 ; recalled, 180 
Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, 139 ; 
opposes Edward II., 147; execu- 
tion of, 148 
Land Acts, Irish, 896, 944 
Land Bill, Irish, Gladstone's, 914 
Land Bills, Irish, 921, 922, 926 
Land League, the Irish, 904, 913, 
914; attack on, by the Times, 

923 

Land Purchase Act (Ireland), Ash- 
bourne's, 919, 924 

Land-tax, the 519 ; reassessment 
of, in 1692, 542 ; 588 

Land tenure, 44, 60-62, 176, 219 

Landen, battle of, 519 

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, 54, 58, 67 ; death of, 68 ; 72 

Langland, William, author of the 
Vision of Piers Plowman, 175, 
238 

Langport, battle of, 436 

Langside, battle of, 325 

Langton, Stephen, Archbishop, 96, 
98, 99, 102, no 

Largs, battle of, 115 

La Rochelle, British fleet defeated 
at, 163 

Laswari, battle of, 764 



975 

Latimer, Lord, impeachment of, 

164 
Latin language, use of, in mediaeval 

England, 236 
Laud, Archbishop, 407, 408, 412; 

arrested on charge of treason, 423 
Lauderdale, Lord, Governor of 

Scotland, 474, 485 
Law, Saxon, 42 ; evolution of, 73- 

74.88 
Lawrence, Sir Henry, 849, 850, 851, 

866, 869 
Lawrence, Sir John, 866 ; Gover- 
nor-General of India, 887 
Lawrence, Major Stringer, 604, 606, 

607 
Lay investiture, 58 
Layamon, English poet, 236 
Learning, progress of, 14, 49 
Leeds, Duke of. See Danby 
Leicester, Earl of. See Montfort, 

Simon de 
Leipzig, battle of, 762 
Leith, sack of, 294 ; treaty of, 319 
Lennox, Duke of, 355 
Lenthall, Speaker, and Charles I., 

427 
Leo X. , Pope, 265 
Leofric, Earl of Mercia, 31, 34 
Leopold of Austria, 716 
Leslie, David, 436 
Leuthen, battle of, 622 
Levant Company, the, 374 
Levellers, the, 440 
Leven, Alexander Leslie, Earl of, 

420, 421, 432,436 
Lewes, battle of, 105 ; Mise of, 

106 
Lexington, battle of, 661 
Liberalism, 707 
Liberals, the, 813, 814 ; dissensions 

of, 945 

Liberal Unionists, the, 920, 925-926 

Licensing Bill, Asquith's, 953 

Liegnitz, battle of, 628 

Life Peerages, £63 

Light Brigade, charge of, 86x 

Ligny, battle of, 770 

Lille, capture of, 562 

Limerick, siege of, 512 ; treaty of, 
513 

Limoges sacked and destroyed by 
the Black Prince, 162 

Lincoln, in 

Lincoln, Fair of, 101 

Lincoln, John de la Pole, Earl of, 
recognised heir-presumptive to 
the crown, 217; insurrection of, 
against Henry VII., 244 

Lindsay, Sir David, poet, 378 

Literature, 49 ; of the Middle Ages, 
236 ; English beginnings of, 236- 
238 ; under the Tudors, 378 ; of 
the seventeenth century, 543; 
during the eighteenth century, 
702, 808 

Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, Earl 
of, Prime Minister, 761 

Llewelyn ap Griffith, 123-125 

Llewelyn ap Jorwerth, 123 

Lloyd, Bishop, 497 

Loans, Treasury, 709 

Lobau, agreement of, 730 

Lobengula, King of Matabeleland, 

93i 
Local Government, 42, 93 



976 



Local Government Bill (1888), 926, 
927 

Locke, John, his theory of the 
Social Contract, 547, 571 

Lollards, the, 181, 190, 284; re- 
peal of Acts against the, 299 

Lombards, financial relations with 
Edward I., 140 ; banishment of, 

147 
London, captured by Alfred the 

Great, 19; 47, in ; Great Fire 

of, the, 472 
London Convention, the (1884), 

9 12 . 933 

London County Council, the, 944 

Londonderry, siege of, 511 

Longchamp, William, Chancellor 
and Chief Justiciar, 92 

Long Parliament, the, 423, 452 

Lords, House of, 914, 918, 927, 
952,953, 954 ; reject the Budget of 
1909, 954 ; proposed reconstruc- 
tion of, 958-959 

Lords of the Articles, 186 

Lords Ordainers, the, 147, 148 

Lose-Coat Field, battle of, 212 

Lostwithiel, battle of, 433 

Lothian, 21 ; ceded to Malcolm of 
Scotland, 30 

Loudon Hill, battle of, 138 

Louis IX. of France, 105 

Louis XL, of France, 210; War- 
wick's alliance with, 211-212 ; 
pays tribute to Edward IV. , 215 

Louis XIV. of France makes secret 
treaty with Charles II. , 471, 476, 
479, 483; revokes the Euict of 
Nantes, 494; wars of, 498, 511, 
550; makes overtures for peace, 
563 

Louis XV. of France, 575, 614 ; 
and the " Family Compact," 589 

Louis XVI. of France, 714 ; de- 
clares war on Austria, 715 ; exe- 
cution of, 717 

Louis XVIII. of France, 763 

Louis Philippe of France, 791 ; 
deposition of, 827 

Louis the Dauphin aids the barons 
against John, 100 

Louisbourg, capture of, 596 ; ex- 
changed for Madras, 597 ; cap- 
tured by Amherst, 624 

Lovel, Lord, insurrection of, against 
Henry VII., 243 

Lowe, Robert, 897 

Lucan, Lord, 861 

Lucknow, 868 ; siege and relief of, 
869-870 

Lumley, 498 

Lumphanan, battle of, 33 

Luneville, treaty of, 735 

Luther, Martin, 265 ; denounces 
" indulgences," 271 ; condemned 
by the Edict of Worms, 272 

Luttrell, Colonel, 653 

Lydgate, John, poet, 239 

Lyly, John, 379 

Lyndhurst, Lord Chancellor, 876 

Lytton, Lord, Viceroy of India, 
905-907 

M'Alpine, Kenneth, King of Scot- 
land, 21 

M'Kay, General, commands forces 
of William III. in Scotland, 515 



INDEX 

M'Lauchlan, Margaret, martyrdom 

of, 5*3 
M'Quarrie, Governor of New South 

Wales, 799 
Macaulay, Lord, 845, 856 
Macbeth, King of Scots, 33 
MacHeths, the, pretenders to 

Scottish throne, 114, 115 
MacNaghten, Resident, murder of, 

846 
Macpherson, James, 809 
Macpherson, Sir John, 719 
MacWilliams, the, Scottish pre- 
tenders, 114, 115 
Machinery, introduction of, 697 
Mad Parliament, the, 104 
Madog, 126 
Madras, captured by the French 

and exchanged for Louisbourg, 

597 ; 604-605, 678 
Madrid, Wellington in, 761 
Maegth, 44 

Maes Madog, battle of, 125 
Mafeking, siege of, 935 ; relief of, 

937 

Magersfontein, battle of, 935 

Magna Carta, 99, 120 

Magnum Concilium, 59 

Maharajpur, battle of, 847 

Mahdi, the, 916 ; death of, 940 

Mah£, capture of, 678 

Maida, battle of, 750 

Main Plot, the, against James I., 
386, 387 

Maintenance and Livery, Statutes 
of, 250 

Mainwaring, 408 

Mainz, 726 

Maiwand, battle of, 908 

Majuba, battle of (1880), 912 

Malcolm I. , King of Scots, alli- 
ance with Edmund, 24 

Malcolm II., King of Scotland, 30 

Malcolm Canmore, King of Scot- 
land, 33; entente with William I., 

S 1 . S3. °9 

Malcolm IV. , King of Scotland, sur- 
renders his claims on Northum- 
berland and Cumberland, 82, 114 

Male-tolte , 130, 131 

Mallory, Sir Thomas, author of the 
Morte Arthur, 239 

Malplaquet, battle of, 563 

Malta, seized by Napoleon, 732, 
733, 735 ; finally ceded to Britain, 
775 ; despatch of Indian troops 
to, 903 

Manchester, Edward Montague, 
Earl of, Parliamentary General, 
429 

Manchester and Liverpool Railway, 
the, 852 

Manchester Committees, 817 

Manchester Martyrs, the, 886 

Manchester School, the, 901 

Mandeville, Sir John, travellC- and 
author, 239 

Manhood Suffrage, 820 

Manor, the, 43, 63, 111 

Manufactures, growth of, 220 

Maories, the, 840-841 

Map, Walter, 236 

Mar, Earl cf, Regent of Scotland, 

iSi 

Mar, John, Earl of, leads Jacobite 
rebellion. £72 



Marathas, the, 603, 606, 630, 6323 
655, 675, 6y6 t 67d, 680, 720, 764, 
794. 795. 8 64. 867 

March, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of, 
163 

Marchand, Major, at Fashoda, 941 

Marengo, battle of, 735 

Margaret of Anjou, 208, 209, 210; 
defeated at Tewkesbury, 213 

Margaret of Denmark, marriage to 
James III. of Scotland, 225 

Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. , 
married to James IV. of Scotland, 
248 

Margaret, the Maid of Norway, 127, 
132 

Maria Theresa and the War of the 
Austrian Succession, 593-597. 614 

Marie Louise of Austria married to 
Napoleon, 756 

Maritime expansion during the 
eighteenth century, 695 

Marlborough, John Churchill, 
Duke of, 508 ; campaign in Ire- 
land, 512 ; 522, 529 ; ministerial 
supremacy of, 549-550 ; cam- 
paigns of, 551-555, 560 ; Tory op- 
position to, 554 ; campaigns of, 
560 ; his diplomacy, 560, 561 ; 
victory of Ramillies, 560 ; fall of, 
566, 576 

Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 
55°. 554 ! loses her influence 
with Queen Anne, 564, 582 

Marlowe, Christopher, 380 

Marmont, Marshal, 759 

Marriage Act, 610 

Marshal, Richard, 103 

Marston Moor, battle of, 432 

Martin Mar-Prelate tracts, the, 371, 

405 

Mary Queen of Scots, 294 ; married 
to the French Dauphin, 299 ; 314, 
318 ; marries Henry, Lord Darn- 
ley, 322 ; marries Bothwell, 324 ; 
abdication of, 324 ; escapes from 
Lochleven Castle, 325 ; held 
prisoner by Elizabeth, 326, 345 ; 
trial and execution of, 344-345 

Mary of Lorraine, Regent of Scot- 
land, 318 

Mary I. proclaimed Queen, 307 ; 
marries Philip of Spain, 309 ; per- 
secution of Protestants, 310 ; war 
with France and death of, 313 

Mary II. married to William of 
Orange, 479 ; death of, 522 

Maserfield, battle of, 12 

Masham, Mrs., favourite of Queen 
Anne, 563 

Massena, Marshal, 734, 759 

Masters and Servants Act, the, 
891 

Masulipatam seized by Clive, 633 

Matabele, the, 841, 843 

Matilda, daughter of Henry I., 
recognised heir to the English 
throne, 72, 75 ; retires from 
England, jy 

Maud, Empress. See Matilda 

Maurice of Saxony. See Saxe 

Mauritius, annexation of, 765 , 
finally ceded to Britain, 775 

Mayflower, sailing of the, 408, 533 

Maynooth, Peel's grant to, 834 

Mayo, Lord, Viceroy of India, 905 



Mcath, Earl of, Justiciar of Ireland, 

9 1 
Medway, Dutch fleet sails up the, 

472 
Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, war 

with Britain, 822 
Melbourne, Lord, Prime Minister, 

814, 815, 819, 832, 837-838 
Melville, Andrew, Scottish Re- 
former, 355, 416 
Menai Strait, Edward I. defeated 

near, 125 
Menschikoff, Prince, 860, 861 
Mercantile system, the, 586 
Mercantile Theory, the, 538, 701 
Mercantilism, beginnings of, 372 
Merchant Ad venturers, 220, 255, 373 
Merchants of the Staple, 167, 169, 

220, 373 
Mercia, 50 
Metcalfe, Lord, Governor of 

Jamaica, 838 
Methuen, General Lord, 935 
Methuen Treaty, the, 568 
Methven, battle of, 138 
Miani, battle of, 847 
Middle Ages, chief features of the, 

226-240 ; social aspects of the, 

232-235 ; intellectual aspects of, 

235 

Middlesex, impeachment of, 407 

Military methods, Danish and 
Saxon, 48 

Militia Bill, the, 618 

Millenary Petition, 386 

Milner, Lord, High Commis- 
sioner in South Africa, 933, 938 

Milton, John, 544 

Minden, battle of, 625 

Minorca, seizure of, 562 ; captured 
by the French, 617 ; 640, 673 

Minto, Lord, Governor-General of 
India, 765 

Minto, Lord, Viceroy of India, 956- 
957. 962 

Mir Jafar, 631, 632, 634, 656 

Mir Kassim, 656 

Miracle plays, 380 

Mirat, the massacre of, 868 

Mise of Amiens, 105 ; of Lewes, 
106 

Model Parliament, the, 129 

Mogul Empire, the, 602, 655 

Mogul, the, 764; proclamation of 
restoration at Delhi, 868 

Mohammed Ali, 606, 607 

Mohammedans, the, in India, 867 

Mohun Persad, 676 

Moltke, General von, 892 

Monarchy, 39, 40, 59 ; and aris- 
tocracy, conflict of, in the Micjdle 
Ages, 229 

Monasteries, valuable work of, 
during the Middle Ages, 234 ; 
suppression of, 287 

Money bills, 690, 876 

Monk, George, Commonwealth 
General, 449 ; Governor of Scot- 
land, 464 ; assumes control of 
affairs in England, 465 

Monmouth, James, Duke of, 482 ; 
his victory at Bothwell Brig, 487 ; 
defeated and captured at Sedge- 
moor, 493 

Monopolies, trade, 168, 373, 375 ; 
abolition, 395, 541 



INDEX 

Monson, Colonel, 676 ; repulsed by 

Holkar, 764 
Montague, Bishop of Chichester, 

408, 409 
Montague, Charles. See Halifax 
Montague, Henry Pole, Lord, 

287 
Montcalm, Marquis de, 613 
Montenegro, revolt of, 903 
Montfort, John de, claimant of 

Brittany, 156 
Montfort, Simon de, 103-108 
Montfort, Simon de, the younger, 

107 
Montgomerie brothers, rebellion of, 

7i 

Montjoy, 360 

Montreal, capture of, 629 

Montrose, James, Marquis of, de- 
feats Covenanters at Tippermuir, 
433; captures Aberdeen, 433; 
successes of, 436 ; capture and 
execution of, 447-448 

Moore, Sir John, 754 ; killed at 
Corunna, 755 

Moots, Shire and Hundred, 42- 

43 
Morality plays, 380 
Moray, Randolph, Earl of, 142 ; 

Regent of Scotland, 150, 151 
Moray, James Stuart, Earl of, 321 ; 

appointed Regent of Scotland, 

325 ; his rule, 329 
Mordaunt, General, 621 
More, Sir Thomas, 270, 274, 280, 

282 ; executed, 283, 366, 379 
Moreau, General, 728, 735 
Morkere, Earl of Northumbria, 34, 

35 ; defeat of, 37, 51 
Morlaix, battle of, 156 
Morley, Lord, Secretary for India, 

9S 6 -9S7. 9 6 2. 
Moroccan Crisis, the, 964 
Morte Arthur, the, 239, 378 
Mortimer, Edmund, Earl of March, 

163 
Mortimer, Roger, (i.) 107 ; (ii.) 144 ; 

subdues Ireland, 145 ; 148, 149 ; 

execution of, 150 
Mortimer's Cross, Yorkist victory 

at, 209 
Mortmain, Statute of, 121, 181 S 
Morton, Archbishop, 248, 270 
Morton, James Douglas, Earl of, 

Regent of Scotland, 329, 354 
Morton's Fork, 251 
Moscow, burning of, 762 
Mudki, battle of, 849 
Multan, 850 

Municipal Reform Act, 819 
Munro, Major Hector, defeats 

Shujah Daulah at Buxar, 656- 

657 
Murat, Joachim, King of Naples, 

753. 769 
Muscovy Company, the, 374 
Mutiny Act, 506 
Muzaffar Jang, 606 
Mysore, Warren Hastings's war 

with, 678 
Mystery plays, 380 

" Nabobs," the, 686 

Nadir Jang, 606 

Nadir Shah sacks Delhi, 675 

Nagpur, annexation of, 864, 865 



977 



Namur recaptured by William III,, 

5 2 3 

Nana Sahib, 867, 870 

Nanda Kumar, 676 

Nankin, treaty of, 863 

Nantes, Edict of, 385 

Napier, Sir Charles, 847 

Napier, Sir Robert, 887 

Naples joins coalition against Napo- 
leon, 726 ; conquered by France, 
734 ; Bourbon dynasty of, over- 
thrown, 880 

Napoleon I. , 725 ; conquests of, in 
Italy, 728 ; makes treaty of 
Campo Formio with Austria, 
730; Egyptian Campaign, 731- 
734 ; makes overtures for peace, 
734, 735 ; his designs on India, 
734. 736 ; closes ports to English 
goods, 743; projects invasion of 
England, 746; the Continental 
System, 749 ; successes against 
Austria and Prussia, 750 ; issues 
Berlin Decree, 751 ; invades 
Portugal, 752 ; marries Marie 
Louise of Austria, 756; deposes 
Louis from Holland, 756; 
Moscow Campaign, 756 ; Moscow 
Expedition, 761 ; abdication of, 
763; escapes from Elba, 767; 
final overthrow at Waterloo, 
771-774; sent to St. Helena, 

775 
Napoleon III., 858, 875, 879, 880, 

892, 893 
Napoleon, Louis, enrolled as special 

constable during Chartist riots, 

828 
Naseby, battle of, 436 
Natal, 843-844 
National Assembly, the, 94 
National Assembly (France), the, 

7iS 
National Debt, 519, 542, 579 
National League, Irish, 915 
Nationalist movement, the, 777 
Nationalists, Irish, demands of, 

690 
Naval power under George II., 

596 

Navarette, battle of, 161 

Navarino, battle of, 787 

Navigation Act, first, 221 ; revival 
of, by Henry VII. , 254 

Navigation Acts, the, 373, 451, 
452, 471, 534 ; repeal of, 785 

Navy, Alfred the Great's, 19, 20, 
21 ; beginnings of, 47 ; Henry 
VIII. 's, 333; reorganisation of, 
by Vane and Blake, 451 

Neerwinden, battle of, 519 

Negapatam, capture of, 671, 679 

Nelson, 728; at battle of Cape 
St. Vincent, 729 ; victory of the 
Nile, 732-733; victory of Copen- 
hagen, 735 ; pursues Villeneuve, 
746 ; victory of Trafalgar, 747 

Nennius, 6 

Nepal, Hastings's war with, 765 

Netherlands, French success in the, 
727; campaigns in, 518, 522, 
550-554 

Neville's Cross, battle of, 158, 

New Brunswick, 837 
New Forest, 56 

3Q 



97 8 



INDEX 



New Model Army, the, 433 

New Orleans, British defeat at, 

766 
New South Wales, 722, 799-800, 

839 
New York taken by Howe, 664 
New Zealand, annexation of, 839, 

840; 94s 
Newburn, battle of, 421 
Newbury, first battle of, 430; second 

battle of, 433 
Newcastle, Duke of, Prime Min- 
ister, 611, 617 ; coalition with 

Pitt, 618 ; dismissed by George 

III. , 637-638 
Newfoundland, 945 
Newfoundland Fisheries disputes, 

929 
Newman, Cardinal, 855, 856 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 547 
Newton Butler, battle of, 511 
Ney, Marshal, rejoins Napoleon, 

768 
Nicholas I., Tsar of Russia, 858 
Nicholas III., Pope, 121 
Nicholson, General, 869 
Nightingale, Florence, 862 
Nile, battle of the, 732-733 
Nine Hours Bill, the, 901 
Nizam, the, 678, 719, 720, 736, 764, 

796, 867 
Nobility, Anglo-Saxon, 39 
Nobles, Scottish, factions of, 289 
Nonconformists, 371, 372, 470; 

policy of James II. towards, 496 ; 

under William III., 507; under 

Queen Anne, 554, 555 
Non-Jurors, 507 
Non-resistance, 496 
Nootka Sound, Spanish claim to, 

713 

" No Popery' > riots, 496, 684 

Nore, mutiny of the British 
squadron at the, 729 

Norfolk, 130, 138 

Norfolk, Earl of, conspiracy against 
William I. , 54 

Norfolk, Ralph Guader, Earl of, in- 
surrection of, 56 

Norfolk, Duke of, banished by 
Richard II., 183 

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, Duke 
of, charged with treason to 
Henry VIII., 298 

Norman Conquest, changes result- 
ing from, 55, 60 

Norman, penalty for slaying a, 55, 
60 

Norman rule, general characteris- 
tics of, 108 

Normandy, 56; lost by John, g5 ; 
conquest of, by Henry V., 196- 
197 ; retaken by France, 204 

Norse Chronicle, the, 37 

Norsemen, 21 ; in Cumberland and 
Westmoreland, 24 

North, Lord, 652 ; Prime Minister, 
654, 658 ; efforts to conciliate 
America, 667 ; his Regulating 
Act for India, 675 ; administra- 
tion of, 683-684 ; Irish policy, 
692 ; succeeded by Pitt, 707 ; 
coalition with Fox, 685 

Northampton, Assize of, 86, 96 

Northampton, treaty of, 144, 150, 
151 



Northampton, Yorkist victory at, 

208 
Northbrook, Lord, Viceroy of India, 

90S 
Northmen, coming of the, 15-16, 

17 

Northumberland, 114 
Northumberland, Earl of, rebellions 

against Henry IV. , 189 
Northumberland, John Dudley, 

Duke of, Protector, 302 ; policy 

of, 303 ; execution of, 308 
Northumberland, Thomas Percy, 

Earl of, insurrection of, against 

Elizabeth, 327 
Northumbria, 11 ; Christianity in, 

13; 50 
Norway, relations with Scotland, 

"S 
Norwich, in 
Nott, General, 846 
Nottingham, Council of, 180 
Nottingham, Earl of, 502, 508 
Nottingham, minister of William 

III. , 519. 
Nova Scotia, 837 
Nuncomar, 676 

Oates, Titus, author of the Popish 

Plot, 480, 492 
O'Brien, Smith, insurrection of, 835 
Occam, William, the schoolman, 

23S 

Occasional Conformity Bill, the, 
555 I repealed by Stanhope, 577 

Ochterlony, 765 

O'Connell, Daniel, leader of the 
Catholic Agitation, 789 ; enters 
Parliament, 790, 819, 831, 832 ; 
imprisonment of, 833 

Octennial Act, Ireland, 691 

Oao, Bishop of Bayeux, 51 

O Donnell, Mr. , action against the 
Times, 923 

Offa, King of Mercia, 15 ; recog- 
nised lord of England, 15 

Olaf, Norse leader, 23, 27 

Old Age Pensions, 950, 953 

Old Guard, Napoleon's, charge of, 
at Waterloo, 774 

Oldenburg, annexation of, by Na- 
poleon, 756 

Oliver, Chief Justice, of Massachu- 
setts, 659 

Omdurman, battle of, 941 

O Neill, Shane, Irish chieftain, 

331 

" Open Door," the (China), 940 

Open Field System, 45, 695; dis- 
appearance of the, 803 

Opium War, the, 863 

Orange Free State, the, 844, 908- 
990, 931 ; annexation of, 939 

Orangeman, the, 740 

O-aainers, the Lords, 147, 148 

O-deal, trial by, 44 

Orders in Council, the, 751, 766 

Orewyn Bridge, battle of, 125 

Orford, Lord, 562. See also Rus- 
sell, Admiral 

Orleans, Philip, Duke of, Regent of 
France, 575 

Orleans , siege of, 199 

Ormonde, Duke of, supersedes 
Marlborough, 567 ; impeachment 
and flight of, 572 



Orsini plot, the, 872 

Osbeck, Peter. .SeeWarbeck.Perkin 

Ossian, James Macpherson's, 809 

Oswald, King of Northumbria, de- 
feats Welsh at Hexham, 12; 
overthrown, 12 

Oswin, KingofDeira, 12 

Oswy, King of Northumbria, 12; 
conversion of, 13 ; and Strath- 
clyde, 14 

Otterburn, battle of, 187 

Oudenarde, battle of, 562 

Oudh, 633, 675, 680, 764, 796 ; 
annexation of, 866 ; Nawab of, 
see Shujah Daulah 

Outram, Sir James, 863, 870 

Overbury, Sir Thomas, murder of, 

394 
Owen, Robert, 817 ; doctrines of, 

853 
Oxenham, John, voyages of, 335 
Oxford, Earl of, favourite of Richard 

II., 179 
Oxford, Robert Harley, Earl of, 

intrigues of, 565 ; his fall, 569 ; 

impeached, 572 
Oxford Movement, the, 855 
Oxford, Provisions of, 104 

Paardeberg, capture of General 
Cronje and his force at, 937 

Pacifico, Don, 830 

Paganism, decline of, n ; of the 
Restoration, 544 

Palmerston, Lord, early career of, 
758, 788, 791 ; foreign policy of, 
8T3, 821, 829; Schleswig-Hol- 
stein affair, 830; attitude to 
Russia, 845 ; Home Secretary, 
857, 658, 860; Prime Minister, 
861, 862, 863, 872, 874, 876; 
death of, 877 

Pandulph, papal legate, 97, 102 

Paniput, battle of, 655 

Papacy, relations with, 55, 57, 73, 
96-97, 103, 104, 109, 119, 121, 
129, 132, 136, 171 ; position of, 
during the Middle Ages, 227-232 ; 
and the Reformation, 272, 320; 
' ' deposes " Elizabeth, 327 ; and 
the Tudors, 370; papist plots, real 
and imaginary, against James 
I., 387; Puritan view of, 407; 
fall of the temporal power of 
the, 894 

Paper tax, the, abolition of, 875- 
876 

Papineau's rebellion, 836 

Paris, Matthew, historian, 236 

Paris, Peace of, 639, 666; allied 
armies enter, 763 ; treaty of, 862 ; 
siege of, 893, 894 

Parker, Admiral Sir Hyde, 735 

Parliament, representative, origin 
of, 93 ; constitution and powers 
of, 165 ; under Edward IV. , 214 ; 
power of, 219 ; under Henry VII., 
252 ; the Seven Years, or Re- 
formation, 278 ; refuses supplies 
to Charles I. , 399 ; and the 
Crown, 581 ; corruption of, by 
Walpole, 584 ; the Parliament 
Bill (1911), 958; made quin- 
quennial, 959 ; payment of mem- 
bers, 961. See also Commons, 
and Lords 



Parliament, Scottish, 415 

Parliaments (nickname): Addled, 
391 ; Barebones, 454 ; Good, 164, 
165 ; Long, 423, 452 ; Mad, 104 ; 
Simon de Montfort's, 106 ; Merci- 
less, 180; Model, 118, 129; 
Rump, 465 ; Short, 421 ; Won- 
derful, 180; of Barons, 146 

Parliamentary reform, advocacy of, 
by the younger Pitt, 710 ; de- 
mand for, 790 ; 813 

" Parliamentary trains," 852 

Parnell, Charles Stewart, Irish 
leader, 904, 913, 914 ; overtures 
of, rejected by Gladstone, 919 ; 
921; attack on, by the Times, 
923 ; death of, 923 

Parnell Commission, the, 923 

Parr, Catherine, 291 

Parsons, Robert, the Jesuit, 339 

Partition Treaty , first, 528 ; second, 
528 

Party government, origin of, 478- 
479 ; finally established, 572 

Party system, the, 519-522, 581- 

585 
Passaro, Cape, Admiral Byng's 
victory over the Spanish fleet off, 

577 
Passive obedience, 496, 505 
Pathans, 794, 795 
Patna, 868 
Paul L, Tsar of Russia, alliance 

with Britain against Napoleon, 

733. 735 
Pa via, battle of, 266 
Pax Romana, 2 
Payment in kind, or barter, custom 

of the early English, 46, 47 
Payment of M. P. 's, 961 
Peace of Westminster, the, 478 
Peace Preservation Act, 896, 901 ; 

abandonment of, 913 
Peasantry, condition of, during the 

Middle Ages, 233 
Peasants' Revolt, the, 165, 172-179, 

219 
Peckham, John, Archbishop of 

Canterbury, 121 
Pecquigny, treaty of, 215 
Pedro the Cruel reinstated by 

Edward the Black Prince, 161 
Peel, Sir Robert, Home Secretary, 

782, 788 ; resigns, 791 ; Prime 

Minister, 814, 817, 819, 820, 

821, 822-826; death of, 828 ; his 

work and character, 828 
Peele, George, 380 
"Peelers" (policemen), institution 

of, 784 
" Peep o' Day Boys," the, 740 ' 
Peerage Bill, Sunderland's, 578 
Peers, hereditary, 172 
Peers. See Lords, House of 
Peishwa, the, 765, 795 
Pekin, occupation of, 878 ; Euro- 
pean Legations at, besieged, 

943 

Pelham, Henry, 583 ; Prime Min- 
ister, 608-611 

Pembroke, Aymer de Valence, 
Earl of, 147 

Pembroke, William, Earl of, Pro- 

- tector, 101 

Penda, King of Mercia, 12 

Peninsula War, the, 754-763 



INDEX 

Penjdeh, collision of Russian and 
Afghan troops at, 919 

Penn, William, 534 

Pennsylvania, colonisation of, 534 

Penny Post, creation of the, 853 

Penruddocks rebellion, 457, 458 

Pentland Rising, the, 486 

People's Charter, the, 853 

Perceval, Spencer, Prime Minister, 
758 ; assassinated, 761 

Percy, Bishop, 809 

Percy, Henry (Hotspur), rebellion 
of, 189 

Persia, 765, 845 ; attacks Afghani- 
stan, 863 ; trouble with Russia, 

963 
Perth captured by forces of Bruce, 

142 
Peter the Great, 562, 576, 577, 613 
Peterborough sacked by William 

I-.53 

Peterborough, Lord, military ex- 
ploits of, in Spain, 561 
Peter's Pence abolished by Parlia- 
ment, 282 
Petition of Right, the, 400, 410 
Petitioners, 483 

Philadelphia occupied by Howe, 665 
Philip Augustus, King of France, 

86, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98 
Philip, Captain, Governor of the 
convict settlement in New South 
Wales, 723 
Philip of Spain proposes marriage 
to Elizabeth, 316 ; his war with 
the Netherlands, 321 ; claims the 
crown of England, 346 ; char- 
acter and policy of, 353 
Philip VI., King of France, 153 
Philiphaugh, battle of, 437 
Philippine Islands, the, 722 
Phcenix Park murder, the, 915 
Pichegru, Marshal, 727, 728 
Picts, incursions of, 4, 6, 7, 21, 69 
Piers Plowman, Vision of, 175 
Pigott, Governor, imprisonment of, 

678 
Pigott, forger in the Parnell case, 

923 

Piho forts, capture of the, 877-878 

Pilgrim Fathers, the, 533 

Pilgrimage of Grace, the, 284 

Pindaris, 794 

Pinkie Cleugh, battle of, 298 

Pirates, 4, 7 

Pitt, William, 617; coalition with 
Newcastle, 618 ; policy of, 622, 
628; dismissed by George III., 
637-638 ; refuses office, 647 ; 
accepts office with Grafton, 649 ; 
becomes Earl of Chatham, 649 ; 
policy of, 650; resignation, 654 ; 
last speech and death of, 667 

Pitt, William, the Younger, 684 ; 
becomes Prime Minister, 686 ; 
makes commercial treaty with 
France, 709 ; public loans and 
Sinking Fund, 709-710 ; domes- 
tic policy of, 707 ; fails to carry 
Parliamentary Reform Bill, 711 ; 
foreign policy of, 712, 725 ; wars 
with Napoleon, 730, 733 ; resig- 
nation of, 727 • recalled, 745 ; 
death of, 749 

Place, Francis, 807 

Place-names, 41 



979 

Plague, the, 470 

Plan of Campaign, the, 921 

Plantagenets, the, 81-184 

Plassey, battle of, 624, 632 

Plevna, siege of, 903 

Plural voting, question of, 959 

Plural Voting Bill rejected by the 
Peers, 952 

Pocket boroughs, the, 710-71 1, 
792 

Poictiers, battle of, 159 

Poland, war of the succession, 589 ; 
dismemberment of, 713-714, 726 

Pole, Cardinal, 287 

Pole, De la. _ See Suffolk, Earl of 

Police force, institution of the, 784 

Poll-tax, the, 165, 175 

Pollock, General, 846 

Pondichery, 603 ; capture of, 635 

Poor Law of 1601, 377; Eliza- 
bethan, 695 ; Gilbert's Acts, 
699, 803 ; reform of, 815, 818 

Pope, Alexander, 703 

Popham, Captain, 679 

Population, expansion of, 45, 47; 
distribution of, 233,801-802 

Port Mahon, surrender of, 617 

Portland, William Bentinck, Duke 
of, favourite of William III., 523 

Portland, Duke of, minister of 
George III., 685 ; resigns, 758 

Portugal, Napoleon's invasion of, 

75 2 
Potchefstroom, battle of, 911 
Pottinger, Eldred, 846 
Power-loom, invention of, by Ed- 
mund Cartwright, 698 
Poynings' Act, 258, 290 
Praemunire, Statute of, 171, i8t 
Pragmatic Sanction, the, 590, 593 
Prayer Book, the first, 300, 302, 

304; of Elizabeth, 316 
Preference, Imperial, 949-950 
Prerogative, the Royal, 167 
Presbyterians, 407, 415-420, 431 ; 
negotiations with Charles I. , 438, 
440 ; 467, 469, 516 
Preston, battle of (i.), 442; (ii.) 

574 
Preston's plot against William III. , 

5i8 
Pretanes, or Britanni, 1 
Pretender, the Young, 598-601 
Prevention of Crimes Bill (Ireland), 

915 

Pride's Purge, 444 

Protection, 534, 539, 568, 784, 826, 
876 ; advocated by Joseph Cham- 
berlain, 949 

Protectorate, the, 454 

Protestantism, rise and growth of, 
273-274 ; struggles of, 327 ; on 
the Continent, 385 ; in Ireland, 
688 

Provisions of Oxford, 104 

Provisors, Statutes of, 171, 181 

Prussia, alliance with, 614, 616 j 
French Republic's war with, 725 ; 
withdraws from the coalition 
against the French Republic, 728; 
alliance with Russia against Na- 
poleon, 762 ; wars with Austria 
and France, 892-893 

Prynne, John, 413 

Public Law of Europe, the, 752 

Pulteney, William, 588 



9 8o 



Puna, Peishwa of, 764 
Puniar, battle of, 847 
Punjab, the, 765, 797, 845, 848 ; 

annexation of, 851, 864 ; 867 
Purchase system in the Army, 

abolition of, 899 
Puritans, the, 372, 385, 404, 544 
Pusey, Dr. E. B.,855 
Pym, John, 400, 409, 410, 430 : 

death of, 431 
Pytheas of Massilia, 1 

Quakers, the, 456 

Quarterly Review, the, 811 

Quatre Bras, battle of, 770 

Quebec Act, 659 

Quebec, capture of, 626-628 

Queensland, 839 

Quetta, 908 

Quia Emptores, Statute of, 122, 

138 
Quo Warranto , writ of, 120 

Raglan, Lord, 860 

Ragoba, 676, 678 

Railway, the Stockton and Darling- 
ton, 808 

Railways, 852 

Rajputana, 867 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 354, 361 ; 
granted patent for colonisation, 
374 ; imprisonment of, 386 ; exe- 
cution of, 391 ; his attempt to 
colonise Virginia, 531, 543 

Ramnagar, battle of, 851 

Ramsay, Allan, 809 

Ranjit Singh, 765, 797, 845, 848 

Ranulf of Chester, 101 

Ray, 548 

Reade, Charles, 888 

Reciprocity of Duties Act, 785 

Recusancy, 388 

Redistribution Bill, the, 918 

Redistribution, electoral, 959 

Redwald, King of East Anglia, 
12 

Reform Bill, the (1832), 791-794, 
852 ; Derby's, 874 ; of 1866, 884, 
83 S 

Reformation, the, 228, 268 ; de- 
velopment of the, 300 ; in Scot- 
land, 318, 367, 415 

Regency Bill (George III.) (i.), the, 
647; (ii.) 711, 758 

Regulating Act for India, Lord 
North's, 675, 718 

Religion, 855 

Renaissance, the, 268 

Renunciatory Act (Ireland), 695 

Representation, Parliamentary, 792 

Representative Parliament, origin 

o f . 93 
Resolutioners, the, 485 
Restoration, the, 467 
Restoration Law of Settlement, 

69S 
Restraint of Appeals Act, 281 
Retaliation, commercial, 539 
Reunion of Canada Act, 837 
Revenue, Crown, 63,468 ; national, 
farming of the, 74, 167, 169-171, 
390 ; and expenditure in the 
seventeenth century, 540 ; and 
expenditure, 875 
Revocation, Act of, 418 
Revolution, the, 384, 498-504 



INDEX 

Revolution, the Industrial, 805 

Revolution, the "July," 791 

Revolutions, political, 99 

Rhine, campaign of the, Napoleon's, 
727 

Rhine, Confederation of the, 750 

Rhodes, Cecil, 931-932, 935 

Rich, Edmund, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, 103, 104, no 

Richard I., " Cceur-de-Lion," 91 ; 
captive of German Emperor, 93 ; 
ransomed, 93 ; wars of, 93 ; death 
of, 94 ; 109 

Richard II., accession of, 164; 
meets Wat Tyler at Smithfield, 
177 ; conference with leaders of 
the Peasants' Revolt, 177 ; sub- 
ordinated by Lords Appellant, 
180 ; asserts his authority, 180 ; 
policy of, 181 ; despotism of, 183 ; 
abdication of, 184; death of, 
188 

Richard III. seizes the crown, 216 ; 
conspiracy against, 216 ; char- 
acter of, 217; policy of, 218; 
defeated and slain at the battle 
of Bosworth, 218 

Richard, son of Edward IV., 215, 
217. See also Warbeck, Perkin 

Richard of Cornwall, brother of 
Henry III., 104, 108 

Richardson, Samuel, 705 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 385, 411 

Richelieu, Duke of, makes Con- 
vention of Kloster Seven, 621 

Ridley, Nicholas, Bishop of Lon- 
don, 304, 309 

Ridolfi's plot against Elizabeth, 
328 

Right, Declaration of, the, 503 

Rights, Bill of, 508 

Ripon, Lord, Governor-General of 
India, 907 ; Viceroy of India, re- 
forms of, 917 

Rizzio, David, assassination of, 322 

Robert of Belleme, 71 

Robert of Normandy, 66, 68, 70, 

7 1 
Robert II. , King of Scotland, 186 
Robert III., King of Scotland, 187 
Roberts, Lord, march to Kabul, 
906 ; relieves Kandahar, 907-908 ; 
takes command in South Africa, 
936 ; enters Bloemfontein, 937 
Robertson, William, 706 
Robespierre, 725 
" Robin of Redesdale," insurrection 

of, 212 
Robinson, Sir Hercules, 911 
Rochambeau, General, 670 
Rochefort, failure of British expedi- 
tion against, 621 
Rochelle, Buckingham's expedi- 
tion to, 399 
Roches, Peter des, 102, 103 
Rochester, Earl of, minister of 

William III., 528 
Rochester, Lawrence Hyde, Earl 

of, 492 
Rockingham, Marquis of, Prime 
Minister, 647; second ministry, 
684; opposes Irish control of 
Irish taxation, 692 
Rodney, Admiral, 625 ; successes 
of, 670 ; defeats De Grasse in the 
West Indies, 672-673 



Rogers, John, martyred, 311 

Rohilla War, the, 675 

Rolles, John, 409 

Roman Catholics, enactments 

against, 340, 525 ; banishment 

of priests, 388 
Roman subjugation of Britain, 2 ; 

influence of, 5 
Rooke, Sir George, defeats the 

French fleet at La Hogue, 518 ; 

expedition to Cadiz, 551-552 ; 

victory at Vigo, 552 ; captures 

Gibraltar, 554 
Root and Branch Bill, the, 425 
Rorke's Drift, defence of, 910 
Rose, Sir Hugh, 871 
Rosebery, Lord, 918 ; Premiership 

of, 924, 927; resigns the Liberal 

leadership, 940; 945 
Roses, War of the, 206 et sea. 
Ross, General, 766 
Rossbach, battle of, 622 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 888 
Rotten boroughs, the, 791 
Rouen, siege of, by Henry V., 

197 
Roundway Down, battle of, 430 
Roxburgh taken by the forces of 

Bruce, 142 ; siege of, 224 
Royal Proclamations Act, repeal of, 

367 
Royal Society, foundation of the, 

548 

Rullion Green, battle of, 486 

Rump, Parliament, the, 444, 445, 
450; ejected by Cromwell, 453; 
dissolution of, 465 

Runnymede, 99 

Rupert, Prince, leader of Royalist 
cavalry, 430, 432; repulsed by 
Admiral Blake, 449 

Ruskin, John, 856, 888 

Russell, Admiral Edward, 498, 
518, 519. See also Orford, Lord 

Russell, Lord John, 791 ; Prime 
Minister, 814, 826, 829, 834, 857, 
873 ; foreign policy of, 878-880 ; 
retirement of, 883, 894 

Russell, Lord William, executed 
for complicity in Rye House Plot, 
490 

Russia, 753 ; quarrels with Na- 
poleon, 756 ; distrust of, in regard 
to India, 765, 845, 905 ; Palmer- 
ston's policy towards, 813, 822; 
the Crimean War, 858-859; war 
with Turkey, 903 ; mission at 
Kabul, 906 ; Radical denuncia- 
tion of, 963 ; annexations in 
China, 940 ; British relations 
with , 957-958 ; war with Japan, 

958 
Ruthven, Raid of, 355 
Ruyter, De, the Dutch Admiral, 472 
Rye House Plot, the, 489 
Ryswick, treaty of, 524 

Sacheverell, Dr., attacks the 

Whigs in his sermons, 564 
Sackville, Lord George, 625 
Sadler, Michael, 817 
Sadowa, battle of, 893 
Sadulapur, battle of, 851 
Salabat Jang, 606 
Saladin, Sultan, 86 
Saladin tithe, the, 86 



Salamanca, battle of, 761 
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Earl of, 

minister of James I., 354, 359 ; 

proposes the Great Contract, 

391 
Salisbury, Marquess of, 885 
Salisbury, ■ Marquess of, Foreign 
Minister, 903, 914 ; first adminis- 
tration of, 919-921 ; second ad- 
ministration of, 925; foreign 
policy of, 928, 930 ; Siamese dis- 
pute with France, 939; foreign 
policy of, 939-943 ; retirement of, 

945 
San Stefano, treaty of, 903 
Sancroft, Archbishop, 497 
Sand River Convention, the, 844 
Sanquhar, Declaration of, 487 
Santar Lucia, capture of, 669 
Saratoga, capitulation of Burgoyne 

at, 665 
Sardinia, 725, 878 
Sarsfield, Patrick, 512 
Satara, 795, 866 
Sati, abolition of, in India, 798 
Sauchie Burn, battle of, 259 
Saunders, Governor of Madras, 

606 
Savoy, 725, 879 
Savoy Conference, the, 469 
Sawtre, William, sent to the stake, 

190 
Saxe, Marshal, wins battle of 

Fontenoy, 596 
Saxe- Weimar, Duke of, occupies 

Quatre Bras, 770 
Saxon kings, policy of, 42 
Saxons, the, 4 ; settle in Britain, 

6-8 
Schipka Pass, defence of the, 

903 

Schism Act, the, 569; repealed by 
Stanhope, 577 

Scheldt, French Republic's threat 
to force navigation of the, 716 

Science, progress of, during the 
seventeenth century, 546 

Schleswig-Holstein, Palmerston's 
interference with, 830, 880 

Scotland, early inhabitants of, 5, 
si; English claim to suzerainty 
of, 23 ; early relations with, 30, 33, 
69, 78-80, 113-115, 126-128, 131, 
141 -145; invasion of, by John of 
Gaunt, 179, 185-187 ; affairs of, 
222-225, 259, 288; the Reforma- 
tion in, 318; affairs of, during 
reign of Elizabeth, 32T-325, 354 ; 
affairs of, under Charles I., 4*4 ; 
under the Restoration, 485-488 ; 
under James II., 513 ; the Union, 
556 ; commerce of, in the seven- 
teenth century, 539 ; after the 
Jacobite insurrection of 1745, 
608 

Scots, 69; raid north of England, 
187 ; loyalty of, to Joan of Arc, 
223 ; plantation of, in Ulster, 390 ; 
negotiations with Charles I., 438- 
439 

Scott, Sir Walter, 810-812 

Scotus, Duns, the " Subtle Doctor," 

235 
•Scutage, 82 
Sea power, England's, 128 ; growth 

of, under Elizabeth, 333 



INDEX 

Security, Scottish Act of, 557 

Sedan, French capitulation at, 
894 

Seditious meetings, suppression of, 
779-780 

Selborne, Lord, 955 

Self-denying Ordinance, the, 435 

Senlac, battle of, 38 

Sepoy army, the, 736 

Sepoy Revolt, the, 864 

Septennial Act, the, 575 

Septennial Parliaments, Irish de- 
mand for, 690 

Serfdom, no; gradual disappear- 
ance of, 173-179, 219 

Servia, revolt of, 903 

Settlement, Act of, 504, 528 

Settlement, Restoration Law of, 

695 
Sevastopol, siege of, 860-862 
Seven Bishops, trial of the, 497 
Seven Weeks War, the, 886, 893 
Severn bridge (1779^, the, 700 
Severus, campaign against Scot- 
land, 4 ; Wall of, 4 
Seymour, Admiral, bombards Alex- 
andria, 915 
Seymour, Jane, married to Henry 

VIII. , 286 
Seymour, Thomas, Lord Admiral, 

execution of, 301 
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley, Lord , 

474 
Shaftesbury, Earl of (r), 479, 481, 

482, 483 ; attempts to exclude 

James II. from the succession, 

482-484 ; fall of, 48 S-489 
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 

Cooper, 7th Earl of, 817, 825 
Shah Shuja, 845-846 
Shakespeare, William, 381, 544 
Shannon and Chesapeake, duel of, 

766 
Sharp, James, Archbishop of St. 

Andrews, 486 ; murder of, 487 
Shaw, Dr., declares marriage of 

Edward IV. null and void, 216 
Shelburne, Lord, 654 ; Prime 

Minister, 684-685 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 811 
Shepherd's Calendar, The, 379, 380 
Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 909 
Sher Ali, Amir of Kabul, 887, 

906 
Sher Ali, governor of Kandahar, 

907 
Sher Singh, 850, 851 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 704 
Sheriff, functions of, 41, 50, 74, 

87 
Sheriffmuir, battle of, 573 
Sherpur, battle of, 907 
Ship money, demand for, by Charles 

I., 413 ; abrogation of, 425 
Shipping, growth of, under the 

Tudors, 373 
Shire-moot, 42-43 
Shire-reeve, 43, 59 
Shore, Sir John. See Teignmouth 
Short Parliament, the, 421 
Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, Earl 

of, 498 ; intrigues with Jacobites 

524 ; recalled, 565 ; foils Boling- 

broke, 570, 576 
Shrewsbury, 182 ; treaty of, 123 
Shujah Daulah, 656, 675 



98l 



Siam, Anglo-French dispute over, 

939 
Sicily, 880 
Sidmouth, Lord (Addington), 780, 

782 
Sidney, Algernon, execution of, 

490 
Sidney, Sir Henry, suppresses 

Shane O'Neill, 331 
Sidney, Henry, 498 
Sidney, Sir Philip, death of, 343 
Sikhs, the, 765 ; rise of, 848 ; 

wars with, 849-851; loyalty of, 

867 
Silesia, 613 
Silk, duties on, 786 
Simnel, Lambert, pseudo-Earl of 

Warwick, rebellion of, 244 
Sindh, annexation of, 847 
Sindhia, 676, 678, 680, 736, 764, 

795- 847. 867 
Sinking Fund instituted by Wal- 

pole, 579 
Siward, Earl of Northumbria, 31, 

33. 34 
Six Acts, Lord Sidmouth's, 780 
Six Articles, Act of, 288, 299 
Skelton, John, poet, 378 
Slave Emancipation Act, 838 
Slave trade, abolition of, 750 
Slavery in the West Indies and 

South Africa, 816 
Slavery, abolition of, 815-816 ; in 

America, 881 
Slaves, English, 45, 46 
Sleeman, Colonel, suppresses 

Thuggee, 798 
Sliding Scale, the, 789, 823 
Sluys, battle of, 155 
Smerwick, siege of, 339 
Smith, Adam, political economist, 

701, 705, 708, 709, 784 
Smith, Captain John, 532 
Smith, Sir Sidney, baffles Napoleon 

at Acre, 734 
Smollett, Tobias, 705 
Smuggling, 708 
Social Contract, the, John Locke's 

theory of, 547, 571 
Social Reforms, Liberal Party's, 

951 

Socialism, 948, 961 

Socmen, 65 

Sol way Moss, battle of, 292 

Somers, Lord, 562 

Somerset, 204 

Somerset, Edward, Duke of, Pro- 
tector, 298 ; makes war on Scot- 
land, 298; policy of, 299, 301; 
deposed, 301 ; execution of, 305 

Somerset, John, Earl of, popular 
indignation against, 205 ; death 
of, 207 

Somerset, Robert Kerr, Earl of, 
favourite of James I., 394 

Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 
nominated heir to throne of 
England, 528 

Soudan, reconquest of by 
Kitchener, 940 

Soult, Marshal, 755, 757, 759, 771 

South Australia, colonisation of, 

839 
South Africa. See Africa 
South Sea Bubble, 579-581 
Spafields riot, the, 779 



982 



Spain, the Great Armada, 346-350 ; 
relations of James I. with, 392- 
397; war with Cromwell, 460; 
wars with, under George I,, 576 ; 
Walpole's war with, 590, 592 ; 
war with, under George III., 639 ; 
alliance vith France and America 
against Britain, 669-670 ; joins 
coalition against Napoleon, 726 ; 
alliance with the French Re- 
public, 728, 731 ; withdraws from 
the coalition against the French 
Republic, 728 ; seized by Napo- 
leon, 753 ; the Peninsula War, 

754-763 . _,,; ' ,_ 

Spanish plots against Elizabeth, 

the, 328, 340 
Spanish Succession, the, 526, 550 
Speenhamland Board, the, and the 

application of the Poor Law, 

804 
Spencer, Herbert, 889 
Spenser, Edmund, 379, 380 
Spice Islands, the, 722 
Spinning industry, the, 695, 697- 

698 
Spinning-jenny, Robert Har- 

greave's, 697 
Spionkop, battle of, 936 
Spithead, mutiny of the British 

fleet at, 729 
St. Alban's, assembly of barons at, 

98 
St. Albans, battle of, 207 ; Lancas- 
trian victory at, 209 
St. Arnaud, Marshal, commander 

of the French forces in the 

Crimea, 860 
St. Bartholomew, massacre of, 324, 

328 
St. Brice, massacre of, 27 
St. Iago, repulse of British fleet at, 

592 
St. Leger, successful administration 

of Ireland, 291, 330 
St. Vincent, Cape, defeat of Spanish 

fleet off, 729 
Stamford Bridge, battle of, 37 
Stamp Act (1765), the, 643 ; repeal 

of, 648, 650 
Standard, battle of the, 76 
Standing army, the, reduction of, 

under William III., 525 
Stanhope, James, Earl of, 562, 

564, 576 ; his administration, 

577 
Stanley, Lord, 822, 886. See 

Derby, Lord 
Stanley, Sir William, conspirator 

against Henry VII. , 246 
Star Chamber, Court of, 251 ; 

abolished, 425 
States General (France), the, 715 
Steam engine, invention of, by 

James Watt, 700 
Steam power, application of, 801, 

807 
Steamships, 852 
Steele, Sir Richard, 704, 705 
Steinkirk, battle of, 519 
Stephen, 72; elected king, 75; 

character of, 75 ; quarrel with the 

Church, 76 ; taken prisoner, 77 ; 

death of, 78 ; 109 
Stephenson, George, 808 
Sterne, Lawrence, 705 



INDEX 

Stewart, Sir Donald, at Kandahar, 

907 
Stigand, Archbishop, 35, 57 
Stirling invested by the forces of 

Bruce, 142; besieged by the 

Young Pretender, 600 
Stirling Bridge, battle of, 135 
Stockton and Darlington Railway, 

808 
"Stop of the Exchequer," 477, 

541 
Stormberg, battle of, 935 
Strachan, Sir Richard, 758 
Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 

Earl of, 400 ; supports Charles I. , 

403, 409 ; policy in Ireland, 412 ; 

impeachment and execution of, 

423-424 
Stratford, Archbishop, trial of, 156, 

170 
Strathclyde, 14 
Strikes, 854, 962 
Strongbow, Earl of Leinster, 90 
Stuart, Arabella, 359 
Stuart, General, commands British 

expedition to Southern Italy, 

750 
Submarine cable, the first, 853 
Submission of the Clergy, 280 
Succession, Act of, 282, 528 
Succession, hereditary, 119 
Succession, principle of the, 35 
Suchet, Marshal, 759, 760 
Sudan, the, 915-917, 940 
Sudbury, Archbishop, murder of, 

177 
Suez Canal, the, purchase of shares 

of, 902 
Suffolk, Michael de la Pole, Earl 

of, 179, 180 
Suffolk, Duke of, executed for 

complicity in Wyatt's rebellion, 

Suffolk, William de la Pole, Earl 
of, negotiates truce with France, 
204 ; popular indignation against, 
205 

Suffren, Admiral, duels with Ad- 
miral Hughes, 679 

Sugar duty, the, 824 

Sunderland, Charles Spencer, Earl 
of, 562, 564 ; minister of George 

I.. 576 

Sunderland, Robert Spencer, Earl 
of, minister of James II. , 492, 

5 19 . . 

Supplies, appropriation of, 472 

Supremacy, Act of, Elizabeth's, 

316 
Supreme Head, Act of (Henry 

VIII. j, 282 
Suraj ud-Daulah, 630 
Surat, 764 
Surrey, Earl of, appointed by 

Henry VIII. to govern Ireland, 

290 ; execution of, 297 ; his 

poetry, 379 
Suvarov defeats the French in Italy, 

734 
Sweyn Godwinson, 31, 32 
Sweyn of Denmark, 27, 28 ; invades 

England, 52 
Swift, Jonathan, 689, 704, 705 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 888 
Switzerland conquered by France, 

731 



Tables, the, 420 

Tacitus, 7, 40 

** Tacking," origin of, 525 

Taff Vale decision, the, 951 

Talavera, battle of, 756, 757 

Tallage, 87, 131, 170 

Tallagio 11011 Concedendo, 131 

Tallard, Marshal, 553 

Talmash, General, 522 

Tamburlaine, Marlowe's, 380-381 

Tamworth Manifesto, 819 

Tangier abandoned, 490 

Tanjur, 678, 764 

Tantia Topi, commander of the 
Gwalior army, 871 

Tariff Reform, 949-951, 954-955 

Tariffs, reduction of, by the 
younger Pitt, 708 

Tasmania, 799 

Taxation, 64, 65, 66, 120, 126 ; under 
Edward III., 158 ; a main cause 
of the Revolution, 385 ; settle- 
ment of, under Charles II., 
468 ; 874-876 

Taxation, Irish, control of, 691 

Taxes, war, 87 

Taylor, Alexander, 869 

Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 545 

Taylor, Rowland, martyred, 311 

Tea tax, American resistance to, 
651, 654,658 

Teignmouth, Lord, Governor-Gene- 
ral of India, 721, 736, 763 

Telegraph, electric, introduction of, 

8 53 

Tel-el- Kebir, battle of, 915 

Temple, Lord, 638, 647 

Temple, Sir William, 476, 481 

Ten Articles, the, 284, 369 

Tenants' Relief Bill, ParnelFs, re- 
jected, 921 

Tenasserim, annexation of, 797 

Tenchebrai, battle of, 71 

Teneriffe, Blake's victory at, 
461 

Tennyson, Lord, 856, 947 

Tenserie, imposts on the towns, 

77 

Terouanne, battle of, 263 
Territorials, creation of the, 952 
Terror, Reign of, the, 724 
Test Act, the, 478 ; abolition of, 

788 
Teutons, 4, 7, 8 
Tewfik, Khedive of Egypt, 915 
Tewkesbury, Yorkist victory at, 

213 
Texel, capture of the Dutch fleet 

in the, 734 
Textile industry, growth of, 697 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 

856 
Thegnhood, 39, 40, 41 
Thegns, 43, 45 

Theobald, Archbishop, 77, 82 
Theobald of Blois, 72, 75 
Theows, 39, 46 
Thirty-nine Articles, the, 369 
Thirty Years' War, the, 385, 411, 

461 
Thomson, James, 705 
" Three Estates," the, 165, 166 
Throgmorton Plot, the, 340 
Thuggee, suppression of, in India, 

798 
Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 685 



Thurstan, Archbishop, 76 

Tibet, military expedition to, 956 

Ticonderoga, 626 

Tien-tsin, treaty of, 872, 877 

Tilsit, Peace of, 751 

Times newspaper, the, action 

against, by Mr. O'Donnell, 923 
Tippermuir battle of, 433 
Tippu Sultan, or Sahib, '679, 719- 

720, 734, 736 ; overthrown by 

Wellesley, 763 
Tithe war (Ireland), the, 831 
Tithes, commutation of, 832 
Tithes Act, 927 
Tithing, 44 

Todleben, General, 860 
Toleration Act, 507, 555 
Tone, Wolfe, rebellion of, 739 
Tc-nnage and poundage, 170, 399, 

401, 402, 409 ; abrogation of, 

425 

Torgau, battle of, 628 

Tories, 483, 489, 493 ; and William 
III., 525, 528, 529; opposition 
to Marlborough, 554; under 
Queen Anne, 566 ; 707, 813 

Tories, American, 722 

Torres Vedras, lines of, 759 

Tostig, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37 

Toulon, siege of, 726 

Toulouse, battle of, 763 

Tournai, battle of, 263 

Tourville, Admiral , defeats English 
and Dutch fleets off Beachy Head, 
511 ; defeated at La Hogue, 
5x8 

Town-reeve, 43 

Towns, earl}' English, 42, 44, 47 ; 
charters and trading rights. 95, 
in 

Townshend, Charles, Lord, ally of 
Sir Robert Walpole, 576, 578, 
580, 581 

Townshend, Charles, proposes new 
taxes on America, 650 

Townshend, Lord, Viceroy of 
Ireland, 691 

Towton, Yorkist victory at, 209 

Tractarianism, 855 

Trade, 95, in, 118; licences and 
imposts, 120 ; regulation of, by 
Edward III., 167; expansion of, 
220-221 ; progress of, under the 
Tudors, 372 ; depression of, at 
end of nineteenth century, 948 

Trade disputes, 962 

Trade Unionism, 853-854, 890-891, 
898-899, 948-961 

Trade Unions Act, 951 

Trades Unions, prohibition of, 
802 

Trading Companies, 373, 535 

Trafalgar, battle of, 747 

Transport Workers' Strike, 191 1, 
the, 962 

Transportation of convicts to 
Australian colonies, discontinu- 
ance of, 839 

Transvaal, the, 844, 908 ; annexa- 
tion of, 909 ; independence 
restored to, 912 ; the Jameson 
Raid, 930 ; annexation of, 939 

Travancore attacked by Tippu 
Sultan, 719 

Treasons Act 282 28Q ; repeal of, 
299; 3°5 



INDEX 

Treasons Bill, 523 

Treasons, Statute of, 171 

Trek, the Great, 842-843 

Trelawney, Bishop, 497 

Trent, Council of, 274, 320 

Trent affair, the, 881 

Tribal System, the, 40 

Triennial Act, the, 522 

Trincomali, capture of, 671, 679 

Trinidad, 737 

Triple Alliance, the, 476, 576 ; with 
Russia and Holland, 713 

Triumvirate, the, 676, 678, 680-681 

Tromp, Van, the Dutch admiral, 
472 

Troyes, treaty of, 198 

Tudor dynasty, the, 241 

Tudors, policy and character of 
the, 363-372 ; commercial pro- 
gress under, 372 

Tun, or township, the, 42, 44, 
64 

Turgot, French minister, and the 
American War of Independence. 
666 

Turkey joins second coalition 
against Napoleon, 734 ; war with 
Greece, 788 ; Palmerston's policy 
towards, 813, 822, 858 ; agita- 
tion against, 902-903; war with 
Russia, 903 ; war with Greece, 
940 

Turner, Bishop, 497 

Tyler, Wat, rebellion of, 165, 176 

Tyrconnel, Richard Talbot, Earl 
of, Deputy-Lieutenant of Ireland, 
496, 509, 512 

Tyrone, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of, 
intrigues with Philip II. of Spain, 
359 ; rebellion of, 360, 389 

Udall, Nicholas, 380 
Uhtred, Earl, slain by Knut, 30 
Uitlanders, grievances of the, 931- 

934 
Ulm, capitulation of, 748 
Ulster, plantation of Scots in, 390; 

739. 896 

Ulundi, battle of, 910 

Uniformity, Act of, 300, 303 ; 
Elizabeth's, 316, 470 

Union, the, cancelled by Charles 
II., 469 

Union with Ireland, the, 695; agi- 
tation by O'Connell for repeal of, 
831, 832-833 

Union with Scotland, the, 556-560 

Unionists, secession of, from the 
Liberal Party, 920 

United Empire Loyalists, 766 

United Irishmen, the Society of, 

739 
United States of America, the, 721- 

722 ; war with, 766 ; Civil War in, 

880-882 ; Fisheries Treaty with, 

929 
" Undertakers," 690 
Ushant, battle of, 668; Howe's 

victory off, 727 
Utopia, Sir Thomas More's, 378, 

379 
Utrecht , Peace of, 567 ; treaty of, 

572, 592 

Vagabonds, increase of, under 
Henry VII., 236 



983 



Vagrancy, growth of, after the dis- 
solution of the monasteries, 377 

Valenciennes, capture of, 726 

Valmy, battle of, 716, 725 

Van Tromp, the Dutch admiral, 472 

Vane, Sir Harry, 431, 451 ; execu- 
tion of, 468 

Venezuela, Anglo-American dis- 
pute over, 940 

Vergennes, French minister, and 
the American War of Independ- 
ence, 666 

Verneuil, battle of, 199 ; Scots at, 
223 

Vernon, Admiral, 592 

Versailles, treaty of, 619, 673, 685 

Verulam. See Bacon, Francis 

Vervius, treaty of, 353 

Veto of the House of Lords, aboli- 
tion of, 954, 955 

Vice comes, 41, 59 

Victor, Marshal, defeated at Tala- 
vera, 757 

Victor Emmanuel, King, 878, 880 

Victoria, colonisation of, 839 

Victoria, Queen, accession of, 814 ; 
marriage of, 821 ; refuses to dis- 
miss her Ladies of the Bedcham- 
ber, 822, 852, 878 ; proclaimed 
Empress of India, 905 ; Jubilee 
of, 929 ; death of, 945 ; character 
and policy of, 946 

Vienna , occupation of, by Napoleon , 
748 ; treaty of, 756 ; Congress of, 
767 

Vigo, defeat of Spanish fleet at, 

577 
Vikings, the, 17 
Vill, the, or Villa, 64 
Villafranca, treaty of, 878 
Village, the English, 46 
Villars, Marshal, 552 ; defeated at 

Malplaquet, 563 
Villeins, 56, 64, 65, no; improved 

conditions of, 173, 219 
Villeneuve, Admiral, 746 
Villeroi, Marshal, defeated at 

Ramillies, 560 
Vimiero, battle of, 754 
Vinegar Hill, battle of, 740 
Virginia, colonisation of, 375, 532 
Vittoria, battle of, 762 
Volunteers (Ireland), 692, 693, 694 
Vortigern, 6 

Wade, General, 600 
Wager of battle, 44 
Wagram, battle of, 756 
Waitangi, treaty of, 840-841 
Wakefield, Lancastrian victory at, 

209 
Walcheren Expedition, the, 758 
Wales, 117 ; conquest of, by 

Edward I., 122; Statute of, 126 
Wallace, William, 127, 131, 135- 

137 

Waller, Sir William, Parliamentary 
General, 430 

Wallingford, treaty of, 77 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 576, 578; in- 
stitutes Sinking Fund, 579 ; be- 
comes Prime Minister, 580 ; policy 
of, 581-594 

Walsingham, Sir Francis, 339; 
statesmanship of, 353 

Walter of Coutances, Justiciar, 93 



9 8 4 



Walter, Hubert, Justiciar, 93 ; 
Chancellor, 94, 95 

Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, 51 ; 
execution of, 54 

Walton, Captain, 577 

Walton, Isaac, 545 

Wandewash, battle of, 628 

Warbeck, Perkin, impersonator of 
the murdered Prince Richard, 
245, 246, 247 

Wards, Bill of, rejected by the 
Commons, 366 

Warenne, Earl, 134 

Warham, Archbishop, 270 

Warsaw, Grand Duchy of, 752 

Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of, 
"the Kingmaker," 208 ; alliance 
with Louis XI. of France, 211 ; 
proclaims Henry VI,, 212; de- 
feated and slain at battle of 
Barnet, 212 

Washington, George, 661-664 ; re- 
verses of, 665 ; success at Sara- 
toga, 665; reinforced by French 
troops, 670 

Washington burnt by General 
Ross, 766 

Waterloo, battle of, 771-774 

Waterways, growth of traffic on 
the, 699-700 

Watt, James, inventor of the steam 
engine, 700 

Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's, 
701 

Weaving industry, the, 695, 697- 
698 

Wedgwood, Josiah, the potter, 
700 

Wedmore, Peace of, 19 

Wellesley, Marquess of, Governor- 
General of India, 736, 864 ; 
Foreign Secretary, 758; resigns, 
761 ; Indian administration of, 
763 ; Viceroy of Ireland, 782, 792 

Wellinghausen, battle of, 638 

Wellington, Duke of, campaign in 
Portugal, 754; enters France, 
762 ; victories of Assaye and Ar- 
gaon, 764 ; 776 ; Prime Minister, 
787; resigns, 791; and the Re- 
form Bill, 794 ; 819, 820, 822, 
826 ; death of, 831 

Welsh Disestablishment, 961 

Wensleydale, Lord, 863 

Wentworth, Thomas. See Strafford 

Weregild, 43 

Wesley, John, 703 

Wesleyan revival, 855 

Wessex, royal line of, 59 

West Indies, Admiral D'Estaing's 
operations in the, 668-669, 669- 

673 
Western Australia, colonisation of, 
800, 839 



INDEX 

Western rising, the, 301 

Westminster Confession, the, 431 ; 
Convention of, 616 ; Peace of, 
478 ; Statute of, 120, 122 

Weston, tool of Charles I., 411, 413 

Westphalia, treaty of, 461 

Wexford stormed by Cromwell, 
446 

Wharton, Lord, 562 

Whigs, the, 483; growth of, 489; 
and William III., 523, 528, 529 ; 
under Anne, 566 ; supremacy of, 
under George I., 572, 583 ; policy 
of, under George I. , 578 ; 647, 684, 
707 ; eclipse of the, 759 ; 790, 

813 

Whitby, Svnod of, 13 

White, Bishop, 497 

Whiteboys, the, 690 

Wicklow, English defeat in, 338 

Wiclif, John, 163, 164, 171, 175, 
181, 235, 269 

Wilberforce, William, 816 

Wilkes, John, prosecution of, 642- 
643 ; returned to Parliament for 
Middlesex, 652 ; prosecution of, 
653-654 

William I. (the Conqueror), 32, 37, 
48, 50; crowned, 51; insurrec- 
tions against, 51, 52, 53; oath of 
allegiance to, 54; policy of, 53- 
54 ; his love of hunting, 56 ; re- 
lations with Normandy and 
France, 56; death of, 56; char- 
acter of, 56-67 ; his resistance to 
the Papacy, 57 

William II. (Rufus), character of, 
67; relations with the Church, 
68 ; insurrections against, 68 ; 
death of, 70 

William III., policy of, 505; Irish 
campaign, 509 ; Netherlands 
campaigns, 518, 522 ; foreign 
policy of, 524 ; death of, 530 ; 
and Scotland, 556 

William IV. , character of, 790 ; 
and the Reform Bill, 793 ; death 
of, 814 

William, son of Henry I., 71 

William the Clito, son of Robert 
of Normandy, 71, 72 

William the Lion, King of Scots, 
114 

William the Silent, Prince of 
Orange, 321, 327, 342 

William of Orange, 477 ; marries 
Princess Mary, 479, 494; invited 
to England, 498 

William of Orange, 775 

Wilmington, Lord, Prime Minister, 
60S 

Wilson, Margaret, martyrdom of, 

513 

Wilton, battle of, 18 



Winceby, battle of, 431 

Winchester, in 

Window tax, the, 708 

Winnington Bridge, battle of, 464 

Winwaed, battle of, 12 

Witan, the, 15, 18, 35, 39, 55, S9 

Wite, 43 

Wolfe, General, 624 ; captures 
Quebec, 626-628 ; death of, 628 

Wolsey, Cardinal, 262 ; diplomacy 
of, 265 ; aspirations to the papal 
throne, 266 ; arouses popular 
displeasure, 268 ; and the divorce 
of Katharine of Aragon, 276 ; 
fall of, 277 

Wolseley, Lord, commands Ashanti 
expedition, 900, 910; victory of 
Tel-el- Kebir, 915 ; commands 
expedition for relief of Gordon, 
917 

Woodgate, General, death of, 937 

Wool, 128, 130 ; subsidies, 170, 
220; growing, 375; duties on, 

785 
Worcester, baide of, 449 
Wordsworth, William, 810 
Wulfhere, son of Penda, 13 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, insurrection 

of, 309 ; execution of, 310 ; poetry 

of, 379 
Wynendael, battle of, 562 

Yakue Khan, Regent of Kabul, 
906 ; marches on Kandahar, 907 

" Year of Battles," the, 48 

Yeomanry, the, 174, 175 

Yeomen, the, 695 ; extinction of, 
696 

Yonge, Charlotte D., 888 

York, in 

York, defeat of Edwin and Morkert 
at, 37 

York, Frederick, Duke of, disas- 
trous command of, against the 
French, 727 ; captures Dutch 
fleet in the Texel, 734, 781 

York, Richard, Duke of, antagon- 
ism to the King's party, 205-7; 
appointed Protector, 207 ; de- 
feated and slain at Wakefield, 
209 

York, Richard, Duke of, son of 
Edward IV., murdered in the 
Tower, 216 

Yorkists, plots of, against Henry 
VII., 243, 244, 245, 246 

Yorktown captured by Washing- 
ton, 671-672 

Zemindars, the, 720 
Zorndorf, battle of, 623 
Zulu War, the, 908 
Zululand, 841, 904 
Zutphen, battle of", 342 



2/13 



Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson <&* Co. 

Edinburgh &* London 






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